by
Harcourt Brace, 1999
Reviewed by
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Review
Mark Twain was right: "Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to."
The insight of this celebrated quip is more profound, however, than the great humorist ever intended or imagined. Emotions and feelings play a crucial role in the growth of human identity. Indeed, both the evolutionary progress of Homo sapiens and the individual life journey of John or Jane Doe are based on a deep foundation of sensitivity to factors of physical well-being and the surrounding environment.
Antonio Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens traces the interaction of emotion and feeling to the very core of the human brain. Following this inward exploration, he charts the ascending course of human consciousness
to its pinnacle, the realm of conscience. Visible displays of feeling
based on awareness of having been caught with one's hand in the cookie jar - the
object of Twain's wry comment - come only at the higher levels of consciousness, with the dawning of "the inner sense of self in the act of knowing."
Damasio is an award-winning neurologist who has made important contributions to the scientific study of emotion, memory and language, and the nature of Alzheimer's disease. He currently teaches at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, where he is head of the Department of Neurology, and at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.
In his critically acclaimed book Descartes' Error (1994), Damasio convincingly argued that "emotion and feelings may not be intruders in the
bastion of reason." Instead, he affirmed a close link between our
emotional reactions and patterns of thought. By promoting emotion as a vital force in human identity formation, Damasio takes an opposing position to the classic interpretation of Western
philosophy. Rationalism, sanctified by Descartes's dictum, has been looked
upon as the foundation of human consciousness.
The Feeling of What Happens is, in many ways, a continuation of Damasio's earlier book. Damasio carefully investigates the neurological basis of how and why we feel the way we do. Basing his investigation upon the latest scientific knowledge, he links the wide range of our emotions to specific sites in the brain. His objective is to build a working model of the process by which the interaction of emotion, feeling, and thought creates our human consciousness.
It is important to follow Damasio's example and make a careful
distinction between emotion and feeling. They share an egg-chicken relationship.
Initially, the body responds emotionally to outside stimuli in a
reflexive, nonconscious manner. Feelings, in his view, are a by-product, leading in
time to self-awareness and higher consciousness.
Damasio's working model of the emotion-mind relationship is based on an "ensemble" of nonconscious brain devices that he calls the proto-self. He defines the proto-self as "a coherent collection of neural patterns which map, moment by moment, the state of the physical structure of the organism in its many dimensions." He further contends that the proto-self regulates the body across the expanse of its entire nervous system.
Key structures in the brain that figure into the functioning of the
proto-self include brain-stem nuclei, the basal forebrain, the
hypothalamus, and a group of cortices in the right hemisphere of the brain.
Significantly, the basal forebrain, brain-stem nuclei, and
hypothalamus are primary emotion induction sites.
The proto-self is engaged in regulating the proper functioning of the body. This process, called homeostasis, does not involve language, power of perception, or knowledge. The neural patterns involved in homeostasis, however, are mapped a second time, producing a "specific kind of wordless knowledge" that enables the human organism to understand the nature of the stimuli affecting it and the context of the surrounding environment. This is the second major level, known as core consciousness.
According to the author, the next rungs on the ladder of consciousness - self-awareness or the autobiographical self, extended consciousness, and conscience - lead us to the blushing or beaming, reflective or demonstrative selves we show to the world.
This impressive and beautifully articulated depiction of the ascent of
consciousness is based upon Damasio's work as a neurologist. He draws upon
case studies of patients suffering from brain damage resulting in memory
loss. These injuries result in the inability to recognize familiar faces, the
"locked-in" syndrome where the stricken are fully conscious but unable to
move except to blink their eyes, and other maladies. By skillfully
pinpointing the brain structures involved in these various forms of
dysfunction, Damasio tries to corroborate his intuitive insights for his
working model of consciousness when it is undisturbed by injury or
disease.
Damasio further substantiates his belief in the emotion-mind connection by noting that there is a "remarkable overlap of biological functions within the structures which support the proto-self and the second-order mapping," the process leading to the creation of core consciousness. He notes that these "second-order" processes are "anchored on ancient neural structures associated with the regulation of life. . . . The light of consciousness is carefully hidden and venerably ancient."
The proto-self and core consciousness are thus the foundation for all the subsequent attainments of consciousness - self-awareness, language, and reason. Damasio demonstrates that it is at this foundation level that the greatest hazard to consciousness can occur. When the brain structures supporting the proto-self and the mapping process that leads to core consciousness are damaged, the effect is catastrophic. Lesions in the critical brain-stem nuclei, for instance, cause coma. Damage to more recently evolved brain structures like the neocortex, which is involved in fine perception, language, and reason, produces far less severe effects.
It is clear from Damasio's astute appraisal that the growth of
individual consciousness and the evolutionary progress of the human species march
side by side. In Damasio's view, this first occurred during prehistory
because the human organism, reacting to its environment, "had to be able to
produce that primordial knowledge, unsolicited, so that a process of knowing could be founded."
When did that "process of knowing" first occur? Did it happen when Homo habilis made the first stone chopper at Oldavai Gorge approximately 1.5 million years ago? Or did it occur earlier, when our hominid ancestors ventured onto the open savanna of East Africa and thus had to adapt to a challenging new environment?
Damasio makes no attempt to answer such questions in his tightly focused study. The rise of human consciousness, in terms of the evolutionary processes, can be profitably studied in Steven Mithen's The Prehistory of the Mind (1996), a book that ably complements Damasio's approach from the perspective of archeology.
What Damasio does make clear about the evolutionary implications of
consciousness, however, is of critical importance. Such things as language
mastery, ethical behavior, and artistic ability are not the litmus test of
self-awareness. Rather, these attributes are hallmarks of extended
consciousness and the means by which enlightened humans can
modify their existence, hopefully for the better.
"Consciousness is a grand permit into civilization," Damasio writes, "but not civilization itself." Damasio's book is an insightful and deeply moving testament to the processes by which human beings can ascend the levels of consciousness, moving from a state of emotionally responding to stimuli to a realm of transcendence.
We react. We feel. We think. We act. Therefore we are.
Ed Voves is a news researcher for Philadelphia Newspapers Inc., publishers of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News. For the past twelve years, he has written book reviews, author interviews, and other news articles for both papers.
The power of consciousness comes from the effective connection it establishes between the biological machinery of individual life regulation and the biological machinery of thought. That connection is the basis for the creation of an individual concern which permeates all aspects of thought processing, focuses all problem-solving activities, and inspires the ensuing solutions. Consciousness is valuable because it centers knowledge on the life of an individual organism.
You may purchase this book (384 pp., hardcover) directly from:
Emotion Home Page - a wide-ranging repository of information about emotion research. It contains an overview of history of theories of emotions, an introduction to study of neuroscience, links to the Web pages of major researchers, including Antonio Damasio, a bibliography, and Web links to other neurological sites.
Consciousness and Neuroscience - by Francis Crick and Christof Koch. From the March 1998 issue of Cerebral Cortex.
How Brains Think, Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now - written by theoretical neurophysiologist William H. Calvin of the University of Washington in Seattle.
Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness - an excellent site for keeping in touch with latest developments in consciousness research. It contains abstracts of presentation papers, a searchable bibliography dating back to 1976, and a wide range of information on conferences and available resources.
Descartes' Error - a provocative discussion of Antonio Damasio's earlier book. By students at Bryn Mawr College.
Mind and Body: Rene Descartes to William James - an excellent online history of psychology and philosophy, which is modified from the catalog of a 1992 exhibition of books at the National Library of Medicine.
Journal of Consciousness Studies - a multidisciplinary approach to the study of the human consciousness, featuring leading scholars and written in nontechnical prose.
