Review of: Descartes' Error

by Philip Marsh

Reviewed by Philip Marsh.

Aficionados of abnormal psychology and medical abnormalities will enjoy a new scientific and philosophical book by Antonio R. Damasio: Descartes' Error. Damasio and his wife Hanna, along with a youngish team of neurobiologists, run what is acknowledged to be the world's leading facility for the investigation of neurological disorders of mind and behavior at The University of Iowa College of Medicine in Iowa City. They have assembled there the largest number of brain damaged patients anywhere: about eighteen hundred. They are threatening to bring the neurosciences into the Twentieth Century.

For over one-hundred years, Christian polemics have been aimed at brain studies with almost the same hysteria reserved for the theory of evolution, studies in embryology, and research into genetics. Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection sprang into existence almost full blown, so it was easy for religionists and ethicists to target the theory's dissemination through counter-"education." There is no such comprehensive theory of "mind" or "soul" for them to attack, so they have been content merely to caution their flocks with solemn warnings about the "pretensions" and "errors" of brain studies as they relate to human behavior, in order to maintain and bolster flagging belief in what Arthur Koestler wittily called the "ghost in the machine." The problem today is that this artificially retarded science is being flooded by what Damasio calls a "torrent" of new and surprising empirical data about the brain that threatens to "engulf," he says, clear thinking. Neurology's day has come.

Damasio never mentions Christianity or religion in the book. He is extremely cautious. Instead, he takes on directly the philosopher he rightly calls the "emblem for a collection of ideas on body, brain, and mind that in one way or another remains influential in Western sciences and humanities": Rene Descartes. Descartes' famous dictum, cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I exist") encapsulates the theoretical framework for Christian thinking that split mind and soul from brain and body. Even the idea, says Damasio, that the mind is a kind of "software program" running in a piece of "computer hardware" called the brain is a result of Descartes' pernicious and influential legacy. Likewise for the notion that the carnal body is - as far as mental functions are concerned - only a kind of life-support system for brain and mind. Historically, dualistic Cartesian ideas have supported religious thought by suggesting that thinking - and awareness of thinking - are the real substrates of life and being, and are anchored in an immortal, supernatural, and divine substratum Descartes called the res cogitans - the "thinking thing," the soul.

Damasio shows that the mind is not the brain nor any part of the brain, but consists of the entire ensemble of brain, its peripheral nerves, and the viscera and bodily organs. Damasio is as wary of the notion of "consciousness," a Cartesian and neo-Cartesian favorite, as Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA. This is probably because the Western Christian tradition perennially produces thinkers, such as Julian Jaynes (or even Jeffrey Deboo and Michael Aquino) who use the notion of consciousness in a manner paralleling Descartes' use of the idea of "soul": as an exclusively human mental attribute, a kind of "Cartesian theater of the mind," as neurobiologist Daniel Dennett calls it, that separates men from animals, which are then viewed as "soulless automatons," as Descartes said they are. But neurological research, Damasio indicates, shows that animals not only have the mental qualities of subjectivity and selfhood, with neural circuits corresponding and functioning like humans' to prove it, but they also have what Damasio calls "metaselves": neurally based, non-verbal moving narratives in their memories of themselves as protagonists of experience seen from an external perspective. All that humans possess that is more than this is a kind of second-order narrative capacity which, even in its most developed form, Damasio suggests, consists only of the existence of language.

But the main thrust of the book is to strike at the Cartesian idea that emotions and feelings are the nemeses of cold-blooded reasoning. This view can be found everywhere in the West: from Kant's notion of the "cool strategist," to Twentieth Century neo-Cartesians, like John-Paul Sartre, who viewed emotions as utterly irrational, as "marginal comedies of impotence," as obscuring falsities, as spontaneously arising degradations of consciousness, forms of hysteria and denial. Damasio has overwhelming, clearly presented clinical evidence that emotions and feelings, which are neurally- and chemically-conveyed reports to brain cortices of body and organ states and conditions, are absolutely essential for reasoning and competent logic, and for acting in one's own rational self-interest.

To prove this, Hanna Damasio resurrected a Nineteenth Century medical curiosity: the strange case of Phineas Gage, whose name has already appeared recently in the New York Times and various popular journals and educational television programs. Gage's case may someday - through the work of the Damasios - come to be known as the study which sounded the death knell for Cartesian dualistic and obscurantist religious ideas of the soul, just as Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus set the stage for the demise of the tyranny of Biblical cosmology. In a remarkable construction site accident, Gage had a yard-long, one and one-quarter inch thick metal bar propelled through his left socket and up through the top of his skull. The bar landed over one-hundred feet away, smeared with brains and blood. Gage never really lost consciousness, and lived another thirteen years in excellent health, even appearing as a circus attraction - hole in head and bar in hand - at Barnum's Museum in New York City. For he had been pronounced cured - except, as some of his former friends pointed out, "Gage is no longer Gage," or, as Damasio says, he was "alive and well," but "a new spirit" animated him!

The entire Gage incident of brain damage was reconstructed by Hanna Damasio on a computer, which generated gruesome images of a thick rod sticking through a skull's eye-socket and out of the forehead. Using these images, the Damasio's were able to identify and locate modern day counterparts of Gage: diseased people with damage to the identical sections of the brain that Gage had torn out. A curious fact emerged: like Gage, these patients suffered no ill health, had no diminution of testable language or intelligence skills, memory, attention spans, deductive or inferential reasoning abilities, etc. Yet every one of them shared a symptom reported of Gage: they became incapable of making even a single rational decision in their own self-interests. The paradox was this: they had no intellectual impairment but could not reason! How could this be? The Damasios found that damage to the section of the brain lost by Gage and his counterparts causes a different kind of "predicament," Damasio calls it: the ability to know but not feel. These patients could no longer neurally convey or "map" onto their cortex feelings and emotions experienced at the visceral level. Lacking these neural maps in their cortex, they truly lack carnal passion and feeling beyond the crudest primary responses of fear, being startled, etc. The feelings they lost, Damasio says, point normals to what he calls "correct decision-making spaces," whether they are decisions demanded of a construction worker like Gage, or of an accountant, artist, or mathematician. Once directed by feelings and emotions, Damasio's neurological evidence shows, other neural circuits - intact and functioning normally in Gage and his counterparts - can then take over and act in a refined logical manner. These patients truly have no carnal input to their reasoning centers, and are not even aware of this, a condition Damasio calls anosognosia, which was suffered by former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas after a stroke damaged areas of his brain. Feelings and emotions, Damasio shows, are not intangible, vaporous, ethereal and useless things, but are rather neurally concrete cognitive entities. Attention span and working memory are not more important for reasoning than emotions and feelings. The "high reason" view of Descartes, that passion must be set aside for thought to be logical and rational, is absolutely refuted by clinical and experimental evidence. Kant's man of "cool strategy" is actually realized in these patients: but while their abilities to carry out cost-benefit analyses are unimpaired, they cannot perform any of the acts Kant thought they would then excel in: they cannot reason and decide.

What they lack, in Damasio's view, will remind the readers of Anton LaVey's idea of "vital existence" (as opposed to "spiritual pipe-dreams," as Dr. LaVey put it): they lack what Damasio calls "somatic markers" for thinking. This is neurological jargon for "gut feelings" which, Damasio's empirical evidence shows, increases the efficiency and accuracy of reasoning. Rational thought results neurologically from a concerted action of the "high reason" centers of the lately evolved neo-cortex of the brain with the older "serpent" or "lower" brain associated with emotions and bodily states.

The neurological evidence goes even further: it shows that these patients also lose something subtle and infinitely valuable: the sense of an integral self, of having an individual identity which Descartes ascribed to a unifying "soul." Such feelings of selfhood, Damasio shows, are actually anchored as on bedrock on a living sameness of background feelings which are constantly backward by forward by nerves and chemicals (neurotransmitters and peptides) to the cortex - information about body states once again. Without this updated full flow of information about current body states, the sense of selfhood diminishes, as does an existential sense: a sense of "being." Feelings offer humans much more than just glimpses of what is going on "below the chin." In neurological terms, the brain systems for reasoning, logic, and rational choice in one's self-interest are fully integrated with both the systems of neurons that report backward to the brain one's bodily and visceral states, as well as with the emotional centers of the cortex. Neurologically speaking, not only do the emotions guide logic, but boost and enhance neural systems which are adjuncts to thought, such as the circuits for focusing attention, working memory, mental imaging, etc.

Now here is a scary thought: Damasio has shown it is possible to have people walking about lacking the continuous involvement of emotion and visceral centers of the body in their thinking. They assuredly have minds, Damasio says, but not the "minds such as we have," as he puts it. Their dysfunction is not really obvious, unless they have a big hole in the head like Gage. Is it possible that there are people in society, perhaps hundreds of millions of them, even at the highest levels of social control, who have a dysfunction of the same brain systems traumatically impaired in Gage, resulting in a diminution of rationality as well as a loss or absence of feeling, a diminution of sense of self, loss of vitality, and loss of an existential, bedrock feeling of being alive? Sound familiar? They would lack a "body" in a neurological sense, as did Gage, but without the macroscopic damage in adulthood such as Gage suffered. Their damage would rather come from abnormal circuitry and brain chemistry beginning, perhaps, early in their development, perhaps continuing through adolescence. If this could be so, their dysfunction should share many (but not all) of the behaviors of the array of behaviors Damasio calls the "Gage matrix." In fact, when one reads his book, one cannot help noting how much of the Gage matrix applies to the people of the Christian West: they make their bodies their brain's captive audience ("eat this, not what you crave, it's better for you"); their bodily states are not a main topic or concern of their lives, but only support side-systems for mental and "spiritual" activities; their planning for the future is disastrous (borrow against your own posterity, kill a few key rain forests, etc.); their sense of responsibility is impaired ("the Devil made me do it" or "my flesh was weak"); they are incapable of orchestrating their own survival at the command of their own free will (seek a "head" or savior to guide you into religion and fascism); they practice "English valet politeness"; deviation from routine they find very upsetting; their sexual interests are dim; they are neither happy nor sad, just kind of numb; they are rigid and persevering controllers who cannot "let go"; they have poor motor abilities ("can't dance") and poor communication skills; they cannot construct an appropriate theory of their own or others' minds ("we are helping the natives, and they love us Brits"); they are unaware of their own handicap; they evince a diminished variety of facial expressions - one can go through Damasio's book and with no effort make a concise list of over thirty-five or so such behaviors which are conspicuously at large and even lauded in a Christian society! Damasio avoids saying this, cautiously using his "emblem," "Cartesian," to denominate Western society. Not of all the behaviors in the "Gage matrix" apply: it would be a theoretical problem if they did, since any presumed brain dysfunction suffered by Christians in general could not be identical to the "ventromedial pre-frontal and somatosensory damage," as Damasio calls it, suffered by his patients. Damasio does not directly address this subject: he is cautious and it is a scientific book about a science still in its infancy, traditionally only a branch of "internal medicine," Damasio laments.

Perhaps in one or two generations the malady Christians suffer and purvey (whether inherent or developmental) will be recognized for what it is - if their devastating decisions and policies based on unworkable and retarding religious and Biblical values do not further debilitate, deplete and suffocate us or poison everyone in the meantime. Perhaps someday, just as the healthy Romans called a Christian a "Chrestian," which means a "simple-mind," a healthier breed of people will point to a Christian and mockingly say: "Phineas Hole-in-Head!"

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