Customer Reviews

Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

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A "negative" title such as this carries unfortunate implications. The "error" must be identified, then explained and refuted. For newcomers to cognitive studies, Descartes "error" might seem an obscurity . Yet it has been the basic tenet of education and social thinking in the Western world for three centuries. "Cogito ergo sum" was translated into the belief that the mind and the remainder of the body were separate entities. Behaviour was controlled by the mind, while the body went about its own business. Damasio demolishes that long-standing mistake for good in this superbly written groundbreaking study.

The first indication of the relationship of the mind and body was the bizarre penetration of a railway worker's skull in 1848. The worker lived, but the damage to his brain left him with severe personality changes. The case opened the door to research leading to mapping areas of the brain that reflected various personality traits. Damasio recounts the incident, matching it with numerous clinical studies of his own. Additional work, some of it strongly innovative led Damasio and his colleagues to a reformulation of how the mind and body interact.

He reminds us that the brain is much more than a collection of electrically interacting cells. The body is sending information to the brain almost continuously, with the brain replying or initiating communication. These signals are both electrical and chemical. More importantly, Damasio reflects on the evolutionary origins of these conditions. For him, it is inevitable that the mind and body interact intimately. His proposed appellation for Emotions aren't separated from our reasoning processes, but are an integral part of them. The attempts by parents and educators to "train out" emotions in children are thus doomed to fail.

Damasio's thesis hinges on what he calls "somatic markers." The markers are areas of the brain which continuously interact with the body, particularly those areas we associate with emotions. If confronted with emotionally charged choices, the stomach "knots," the face may "flush" warmly, and perspiration may increase markedly. These body/brain functions begin developing early in the embryo. Indeed, they have a long evolutionary history, which firmly establishes their roots. In humans, the brain not only controls/reacts with the body in addressing stressful circumstances, but retains some level of memory of the events causing the reactions. Hence, even thinking about such circumstances can lead to bodily reactions associated with them. You need not be confronting an emotional situation to be able to express the feelings associated with it. This, of course, is most notably seen in actors or other performers. Damasio offers the excellent example of orchestra conductor Herbert von Karajan, whose pulse rate was higher while conducting than when confronted with an emergency situation in an airplane. To Damasio, "Descartes' error" was that he placed all these controls in a central location of the "mind" where, in fact, they are scattered over much of the brain.

The implications from this book will be far reaching. Besides impacting academic courses on behaviour, there will be changes in how we parent, how we deal with education, and even in the realm of law. Binding reason and emotion will revise uncountable long-standing ideas about how the mind deals with our surroundings. It is a work addressing fundamental questions about what make us human. Read it with care, aware that many preconceptions are likely to be challenged. The rewards for this effort will be great in years to come. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Other reviewers have surely summarized and analyzed this fine book far better than I could, so here are some hints that may help you productively enjoy it:
1.) scan sections of the book before and after you read them. The author's simple expositions are terrific but the organization and data blending can be confusing, and the pace of such a book often slows uncomfortably. 2.) If you are new to this subject (and any non-professional who hasn't had a CNS course recently is probably a beginner) I'd supplement this book with a good but lighter introduction to brain research (I'd strongly recommend the NYT Book of the Brain). 3.) I'd advise using a good neuroanatomy text or atlas like Barr or Hanaway. The author's maps are surprisingly skimpy and I strongly hope he includes a few pages of neuroanatomical diagrams in any future editions. 4.) You may want to underline terms and definitions, and note the reference at the back of the book -- the book has no glossary and the index is annoyingly weak. 5.) I thought the most valuable sections were on the Somatic Marker Hypothesis, the Body-Minded Brain, and the Postscriptum -- consider scanning these sections first.
Good luck and enjoy. The author's credentials are superb, his perspective complements other authors such as Edelmann and LeDoux, and he brings the unique and empathetic perspective of a neurologist who has specialied in analyzing the changes associated wtih discrete neuropathological conditions. The ideas you may receive from this wonderful book should be well worth the effort, and you should gain some insight into the miracle of how we think/feel/are.

I came to this book after reading 10,000 pages on the issues of art and science - bibliography on dcreid.ca. I decided to go back and read this 1994 book because it underlies a lot of current discussion and dispute on the role of emotions in thinking and decision making. Because of this central influential role, I gave this book a five star rating. It is highly scientific, so not a light read, and will annoy those with a philosophy background; the title makes you pick up the book, though this is not, ultimately, a refutation of Cartesian views: mind and body, reason and emotion.

First published in 1994, Damasio's classic brain science book put on the map that the emotional and sub-conscious brain is far more important to our thought than the last three millennia of western thought has believed. This is must-read background for those who want to understand how the brain works. The current Penguin paperback has a new - 2005 - Preface where Damasio updates the science of the intervening decade and posits a good summary of what the book covers - you can get the complete argument from it, for those who like to cut to the chase.

The book makes a good case for the use of emotion, feelings, intuitions, and underlying currents of electrical activity from the body (the brain exists in a body after all that bathes it with more than six million nerve impulses a second) in the process of making decisions some of which require much thought and some of which happen instantly without any thought.

For those looking for a quick, decisive account of brain anatomy, Damasio has done a good job on pages 24 - 30.

Early in the book, the case of Phineas P. Gage, circa 1848, who got a metal bar shot through his brain but survived, is discussed. The poor fellow made poor decisions for the rest of his life and had various personality issues - understandably. These result from the areas of the brain that were severed. Then Damasio moves to the present, discussing clients/patients who had lesions (cuts) in the brain and specific personality problems because of them.

Chapter four gets into the nitty gritty science involved in the parts of the brain responsible for normal processing of emotion, personal feelings and its integration with attention and reasoning. Essentially the central lower part behind your eyes, the bands of brain beside and up from your ears and various centres, particularly on the right side, along with the high emotion centre, the amygdala are the areas involved. I have a science background and the chapter had so much content it left my brain whizzing, fascinating as it was about how cuts that separate different parts of the brain result in specific problems that can be teased apart in experiments. Page 83-85 of the next chapter neatly summarizes the science in non-science speak.

One problem with brain science books, and this includes this title, is that memory is not adequately understood yet. Here we do not store true images, but dispositional representations, yet, at the same time we can all recall the Mona Lisa's face, our children and waves dropping on a shore. In other words, I don't think science yet has a convincing argument. Time will tell.

One of Damasio's central insights occurs on page 111: the body exerts effects on our minds and our emotions constantly. It does this through nerve circuits of 'modulator neurons' that are interested in survival and so monitor our conscious mind's, the relative goodness or badness of circumstance and influence our thinking and acting toward or away from them. The end of the chapter section: Beyond Drives and Instincts, p 123 - 126, is a good summary of the science, genetic, biology, reductionist side of the equation with the effects of humans living in and being affected by a communal society.

Damassio then moves to a central distinction for him: the difference he posits between emotions and feelings. The former are, in his definition, about the body, and the latter about the mind; however they are linked in that a conscious feeling results in effects on the body (more than just a GSR polygraph sense), and those effects also can affect the way we think. He sees feelings of three types: basic universal (like fear), subtle universal (like guilt) and background feelings derived from the body in which the brain sits. The full system is drawn on page 163, but don't just flip to the diagram; you need to understand it in context. This again is full of science and I suggest you go through with a yellow magic marker and highlight the high points, if you need something to make you pay attention.

Chapter 8 is the meat of the book: the Somatic-Marker Hypothesis. This means the body's images, or emotions. I think it a bad term, but it was not my choice. The chapter is about how our underlying emotions, our body states help us make decisions, whether good or bad. We can't make 'rational' decisions without the body's input on how it 'feels' about a situation, say avoiding a car accident, how a smile can make your defenses melt, how even the love of rationality is about the love, not the rationality, and so on. This centre which is brought together in time with working memory in the prefrontal cortex, is much about the spindle cell system and its distribution of dopamine as a 'reward' for a gut feeling, whether good or bad. This theme is well extended in Jonah Lehrer's, recent book, How We Decide. Damassio's pages 196 to 201 are where he brings together the entire subject and how the mind, and body movement work through time, and are a fascinating completion of his thoughts, that you should not read before reading the chapter preceding this last section. Basic emotions manage actions in a rational way.

Chapter 9 relates interesting gambling experiments with normal subjects and with ones who have lesions in their prefrontal cortexes where conscious attention is focused. The results are clear that those without proper wiring to receive the bodies accumulated 'knowledge' about past events cannot predict what will happen in the future and thus result in disastrous decision making skills. Normal participants come to learn when to avoid certain decisions because they can read the body's experientially derived feelings about a possible choice. Note that this type of analysis is about our abilities to predict future events, and is from an entirely different perspective than those scientists who focus on, say, how the eye picks up images and sets the mind in motion.

Chapter 10 has fascinating takes on two central features of human thought: consciousness and subjectivity. Anyone who has read the field knows there is hot dispute over the nature of these features and the ability or inability of science ever to be able to study them. Damasio's take on them gets around the problem. You must read this book.

To the "December 18, 2003" reviewer:

"To write a book about Philosophy or related issues one MUST HAVE a degree in Philosophy, in the same way if somebody decides to write about Neurology he/she needs to have the proper qulifications to do so."

That's the typical authoritarian speech of people who hide behind their jobs, their qualifications, their deegrees, etc. Not exactly the right quote, but it describes the context: "Holier Than Thou". Yes, recognition by the expert authorities is a key to being heard, but I ask: when were these high authorities the driving force within ANY thought revolution? Maybe because someone DOESN'T have a deegree on a particular subject, he can express views which aren't tainted by the "academia's" notion of what is correct and incorrect. Most of the radical developments in human thought came without the approval of the "status quo". Ironically, the "status quo" absorves the knowledge of such revolutions when they have been tamed down or when the revolutionaries themselves have become the "status quo".

You, the reviewer, might even be right about Damasio... but you used a VERY lousy argument...

Antonio Damasio does a splendid job of pointing out the interdependence of mental experiences such as body sensations, emotions, and reason. But those searching for new ideas about how all of this comes together in the mind will need to look elsewhere. If nothing else, this book shows the limits of neuroscience. While neuroscience can explain how our brains receive sensory input from the environment (how the brain works), it is unable to explain how we have thoughts and opinions about the environment or where we get the motivation to study and change the environment (how the mind works). Neuroscientists like Damasio, who believe that scientific techniques will eventually explain the mind, show that the real error in the mind-brain debate may belong to the neuroscientists and not to Descartes.

The first question from "Descartes' Error" is whether the somatic marker is the first object of knowledge? A "somatic marker" is a term created by Antonio Damasio, a cognitive scientist and also a brilliant author, who refers to "the feeling about the body" (p. 173).

According to Damasio, the somatic marker is an "automated detection" of things in the environment (p. 175). Similarly, according to Aquinas, the first object of human knowledge is a thing and its essence. Aquinas writes, "being and essence are what the intellect first conceives" (De Ente c. 2). Thus, Damasio's text leads to the philosophical question of whether the intellect first conceives the essence of a somatic marker?

The first conception of the intellect is that which is quickly and directly apprehended by the human intellect. The intellect is the superior knowing power of the human soul that utilizes the information proceeding from the external senses and the internal senses with a special focus on the phantasm or image. Both Damasio and Aquinas are in agreement concerning the nature of the phantasm or image. However, the disagreement between Damasio and Aquinas concerns the first object apprehended by the intellect. This problem is central to investigations in the philosophy of mind. Hence, Damasio writes, "You cannot formulate and use adequate theories for your mind and for the mind of others if something like the somatic marker fails you" (p. 219).

I read this book shortly after leaving a religious group. This book did more than any other to show how the idea of a "soul" is an error at best, and that the solution to the "mind/body problem" is that the mind and body are, in essence, one thing. This book should be required reading for anyone who has ever even contemplated the idea that the "mind" is somehow seperate from the body.

This book is about the central role emotion plays in cognition. Descartes error, dualism, is, well, an error. Few today fail to notice that. However, the other error, the separation made between reason and emotion, is today still lurking in the popular conception of the mind.(even in neuroscience one reads of terrible simplifications like "right hemisophere emotional, left rational" not strictly wrong, but misleading) GRanted, Descartes regarded emotion (qualitative aspects)in the same class of stuff as reason (res cogitas), but the problem is that it is the physiological aspect of emotions that is interesting, and indeed superceeds the qualitative aspects, as Damasio makes clear.

So emotions play a role in all of cognition, including reason. Memories are made stronger and can be wiped out by emotion. Emotions affect attentive mechanisms. As Damasios much recent work implies, emotion might be essetnial to consciousness. Learning is modulated in strange ways by emotions. Emotions seem to know more than we do, sometimes. For example, Damasio tells us of prosopagnosics who cannot recognize faces, but who show viceral (sweating, pulse, etc..) reactions to faces that are familiar. But his main efforts are presenting evidence that reason itself uses emotions to guide its decision making process.

Damasio focuses on neuropsychology. A patient with damage in frontal lobes (seat of reason, but more ventrally, also emotions i.e Phineas Gage)fails to catch on on changing conditions during an experiment that requires the subject to use reason and devise a strategy. It seems that emotion kind of alerts reason of valuable choices and things of the like. Emotion gives value to perception, cetegorizing the usefullness of stimuli, and apparently of different strategies. So you use as much emotion as reason while playing chess. (not that it is a necessary condition for play, look at a computer).this is Damasios somatic-marker hypothesis, the claim that emotions act as warning signals to possible negative outcomes, thus making desition making more efficient and accurate. As the neuropsychological patient shows, no somatic marker compromises reasoning ability.

Damasio also introduces terms like images, and neural patterns. He explains neurobiologically emotions, feelings, among other things. At the end of the book he speculates on the relationship between emotions and things like the self and consicousness, considerations that would lead to his book "The Feeling of What Happens". If you read that, you should get this book too. Sanyone interested in neuroscience, psychology,copnsciousness, or even philosophy should read this. I would recomend also reading LeDouxs "Emotional Brain" to see another more detailed view of common issues.

Damasio's book will be somewhat tough sledding for the non-specialist, but it's still a good book and worth sticking with to the end. Using Descartes's famous dictum as a departure point, and through a discussion of current theory and detailed case studies, he demonstrates the intimate relationship between the brain, mind, and body.

The case studies of sensory agnosia were very interesting, especially the one where the patient had apparently lost the functioning of the part of his brain that stored the awareness of one side of the patient's body, to the point where the patient had no awareness or perception of that half at all, and even denied that he even had a problem with it. There can be no clearer demonstration of the fact that our consciousness and awareness depends entirely on that 3-pound, convoluted mass of nerve cells we call the brain.

As someone with a pretty fair background in the area myself (I did a master's and almost completed a Ph.D. in psychobiology) I can vouch for Damasio's command of the scientific and technical issues and details (notwithstanding that fact that Damasio is both an M.D. and a Ph.D.) so he has a good command of the medical issues also. The book is very well written, although not easy, but Damasio does a fine job of explaining the more difficult ideas.

One further comment, I read one review that was critical of Damasio for supposedly misinterpreting Descartes's dictum, "I think, therefore I am," and then spent the whole review discussing Descartes instead of Damasio's book. The reviewer also stated that because of this Damasio lacks scientific objectivity. Since his comment is itself a good starting point for discussing the most important aspect of Damasio's book, I thought I'd write a little more on it here.

Whether or not Damasio's interpretation of Descartes dictum is wrong or not, (and from the other reviewer's disjointed discussion, that itself isn't very clear), this is a minor detail, since Damasio simply uses this as a point of departure and from there on the vast majority of the book is devoted to a discussion of the neurological and brain issues, not to the technical details of the philosophy of mind-body dualism, for which there are already plenty of other discussions out there (having read many of them myself).

However one should precisely interpret Descartes's famous statement, Damasio is completely correct in pointing out the most important aspect of Descartes's idea--that the mind is fundamentally different from the brain itself and that one needs a dualistic theory to explain the separation of the apparently immaterial mind from the more material body--is wrong.

Although echoes of this theory can still be seen in modern philosophy, and were an important influence on idealist philosophers that followed Descartes, such as Kant, and even continue to have an influence on modern neo-Kantian theory and other thinkers, the advance of modern neurobiology has shown that these theories are fundamentally wrong.

Since we're on the subject--and to be completely fair--I will that say that one aspect of Kant's theory is quite accurate--that the mind is actively involved in organizing the data of the senses--and that ideas about the external world could not exist unless there were corresponding mental capabilities and constucts to match. Our understanding of sensory information processing and of advanced cortical abilities certainly show that the brain has evolved in a way that reflects the need for specific capabilities to enhance our survival in a dangerous world. Kant's idea that there are inborn mental faculties that allow us to form ideas about the external world isn't so different from this idea, and in that sense, Kant was right. (This would have been a good point for the other reviewer to make, but he got lost in the trivial details, and failed to see "the forest for the trees" (as he himself incorrectly said of Damasio)).

Anyway, returning to Damasio's book, this is well-written book on a fascinating aspect of modern neurobiology, and which has profound implications for western philosophies of idealism and dualism. Although not an easy book for the non-specialist, it's worth the effort.

I have one final suggestion to make, and that is you might want to read Michael Gazzaniga's more general introduction to neurobiology: "Nature's Mind: The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, Language, and Intelligence," before tackling this one. It's also an excellent book and you'll have a more well-rounded understanding of the brain field which should stand you in good stead to tackle this book, or any other brain-oriented books, after reading it.

This is at terrific introduction to and arguement against Cartesian dualism. Damasio is a terrific writer and thinker. He presents his own ideas in a clear and compelling fashion.

However, the big flaw of this book is that Damasio presents Descartes' Idea of "Cogito, Ergo Sum" with Damasio's interpretation of what Descarte meant. So, the book is unbalanced. We can hardly hold Descarte accountable for what Damasio has made of him and his ideas. And yet, that is exactly what Damasio does. Damasio "interprets" what Descarte meant and then proceeds in a reasonably logical and coherent way. The problem here is that the premise (the original interpretation of Descarte's idea) is wrong. Descarte did not mean what Damasio would have us believe he meant. Bascially, that "It is a fact that I think; facts exist; therefore I exist." On the contrary, there is no "It" at all in Descartes' thinking.

But once you interpret Descartes to mean something other than what he meant, it becomes a very easy proposition for Damasio to make a case against him. .

From my perspective, Damasio is missing the forest for the trees. While, he does have an interesting idea, and he is a excellent scientist, he lacks true objectivity. He decides what Descartes meant (thereby renedering himself a subjective interpreter of Descartes)and then in effect makes a case against what he thinks Descartes meant. In effect, Damasio makes a case against an idea that is the product of his own imagination.

That said, Damasio's book is an excellent piece of accessible scholarship (as far it goes). But the best thing about the book was that it helped make my own thinking clearer about what it was that Descartes meant when he said "Cogito, Ergo Sum".

And in the spirit of Descartes, "it isn't enough to have the courage of your convictions, you have to be able to have them challenged!" And for that reason, Damsio's book is truly worth the read !