Descartes' Error

🧠 Free Recall ❓ Quiz 🔍 Cues 🔮 Simulation 🥷 ShadowBox 📐 Encode Cards

DESCARTES’ ERROR Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

*Introduction*

I do know when I became convinced that the traditional views on the nature of rationality could not be correct.

I had been advised early in life that sound decisions came from a cool head, that emotions and reason did not mix any more than oil and water.

He had had an entirely healthy mind until a neurological disease ravaged a specific sector of his brain and, from one day to the next, caused this profound defect in decision making. The instruments usually considered necessary and sufficient for rational behavior were intact in him. He had the requisite knowledge, attention, and memory; his language was flawless; he could perform calculations; he could tackle the logic of an abstract problem. There was only one significant accompaniment to his decision-making failure: a marked alteration of the ability to experience feelings.

The strategies of human reason probably did not develop, in either evolution or any single individual, without the guiding force of the mechanisms of biological regulation, of which emotion and feeling are notable expressions.

Moreover, even after reasoning strategies become established in the formative years, their effective deployment probably depends, to a considerable extent, on a continued ability to experience feelings.

Emotion and feeling, along with the covert physiological machinery underlying them, assist us with the daunting task of predicting an uncertain future and planning our actions accordingly.

Emotion, feeling, and biological regulation all play a role in human reason. The lowly orders of our organism are in the loop of high reason.

A second idea in the book, then, is that the essence of a feeling may not be an elusive mental quality attached to an object, but rather the direct perception of a specific landscape: that of the body.

I propose that the critical networks on which feelings rely include not only the traditionally acknowledged collection of brain structures known as the limbic system but also some of the brain’s prefrontal cortices, and, most importantly, the brain sectors that map and integrate signals from the body.

By and large, a feeling is the momentary “view” of a part of that body landscape. It has a specific content—the state of the body; and specific neural systems that support it—the peripheral nervous system and the brain regions that integrate signals related to body structure and regulation. Because the sense of that body landscape is juxtaposed in time to the perception or recollection of something else that is not part of the body—a face, a melody, an aroma—feelings end up being “qualifiers” to that something else. But there is more to a feeling than this essence. As I will explain, the qualifying body state, positive or negative, is accompanied and rounded up by a corresponding thinking mode: fast moving and idea rich, when the body-state is in the positive and pleasant band of the spectrum, slow moving and repetitive, when the body-state veers toward the painful band.

And feelings are neither intangible nor elusive. Contrary to traditional scientific opinion, feelings are just as cognitive as other percepts. They are the result of a most curious physiological arrangement that has turned the brain into the body’s captive audience.

Were it not for the possibility of sensing body states that are inherently ordained to be painful or pleasurable, there would be no suffering or bliss, no longing or mercy, no tragedy or glory in the human condition.

that the body, as represented in the brain, may constitute the indispensable frame of reference for the neural processes that we experience as the mind; that our very organism rather than some absolute external reality is used as the ground reference for the constructions we make of the world around us and for the construction of the ever-present sense of subjectivity that is part and parcel of our experiences; that our most refined thoughts and best actions, our greatest joys and deepest sorrows, use the body as a yardstick.
My Personal Thoughts On This: this is why this book is so important . three big ideas. 1. feelings and emotions affect decision making . 2. feeling as a psychological and biological construct. 3. the body as a component of cognition

This idea is anchored in the following statements: (1) The human brain and the rest of the body constitute an indissociable organism, integrated by means of mutually interactive biochemical and neural regulatory circuits (including endocrine, immune, and autonomic neural components); (2) The organism interacts with the environment as an ensemble: the interaction is neither of the body alone nor of the brain alone; (3) The physiological operations that we call mind are derived from the structural and functional ensemble rather than from the brain alone: mental phenomena can be fully understood only in the context of an organism’s interacting in an environment. That the environment is, in part, a product of the organism’s activity itself, merely underscores the complexity of interactions we must take into account.

*Part 1*

Gage’s youth and strong constitution will overcome the odds against him, assisted, as Harlow will put it, by divine intervention: “I dressed him, God healed him.” Phineas Gage will be pronounced cured in less than two months. Yet this astonishing outcome pales in comparison with the extraordinary turn that Gage’s personality is about to undergo. Gage’s disposition, his likes and dislikes, his dreams and aspirations are all to change. Gage’s body may be alive and well, but there is a new spirit animating it.

The changes became apparent as soon as the acute phase of brain injury subsided. He was now “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity which was not previously his custom, manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned…. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man.” The foul language was so debased that women were advised not to stay long in his presence, lest their sensibilities be offended. The strongest admonitions from Harlow himself failed to return our survivor to good behavior.

This trait, what we might call “collector’s behavior,” is something I have seen in patients who have suffered injuries like Gage’s, as well as in autistic individuals.)

Gage’s story hinted at an amazing fact: Somehow, there were systems in the human brain dedicated more to reasoning than to anything else, and in particular to the personal and social dimensions of reasoning. The observance of previously acquired social convention and ethical rules could be lost as a result of brain damage, even when neither basic intellect nor language seemed compromised.

Gage had once known all he needed to know about making choices conducive to his betterment. He had a sense of personal and social responsibility, reflected in the way he had secured advancement in his job, cared for the quality of his work, and attracted the admiration of employers and colleagues. He was well adapted in terms of social convention and appears to have been ethical in his dealings. After the accident, he no longer showed respect for social convention; ethics in the broad sense of the term, were violated; the decisions he made did not take into account his best interest, and he was given to invent tales “without any foundation except in his fancy,” in Harlow’s words. There was no evidence of concern about his future, no sign of forethought.

Some part of the value system remains and can be utilized in abstract terms, but it is unconnected to real-life situations.

hold. We can now say with confidence that there are no single “centers” for vision, or language, or for that matter, reason or social behavior.

What were the mechanisms behind Gage’s failure at decision making?

Gage lost something uniquely human, the ability to plan his future as a social being. How aware was he of this loss?

Even if a philosophical bent allowed one to think of the brain as the basis for the mind, it was difficult to accept the view that something as close to the human soul as ethical judgment, or as culture-bound as social conduct, might depend significantly on a specific region of the brain.

ventromedial region of the frontal lobe,

Hanna Damasio and her colleagues could say with some foundation that it was selective damage in the prefrontal cortices of Phineas Gage’s brain that compromised his ability to plan for the future, to conduct himself according to the social rules he previously had learned, and to decide on the course of action that ultimately would be most advantageous to his survival. What was missing now was the knowledge of how Gage’s mind might have worked when he behaved as dismally as he did.

Consider the beginning of his day: He needed prompting to get started in the morning and prepare to go to work. Once at work he was unable to manage his time properly; he could not be trusted with a schedule. When the job called for interrupting an activity and turning to another, he might persist nonetheless, seemingly losing sight of his main goal. Or he might interrupt the activity he had engaged, to turn to something he found more captivating at that particular moment. Imagine a task involving reading and classifying documents of a given client. Elliot would read and fully understand the significance of the material, and he certainly knew how to sort out the documents according to the similarity or disparity of their content. The problem was that he was likely, all of a sudden, to turn from the sorting task he had initiated to reading one of those papers, carefully and intelligently, and to spend an entire day doing so. Or he might spend a whole afternoon deliberating on which principle of categorization should be applied: Should it be date, size of document, pertinence to the case, or another? The flow of work was stopped. One might say that the particular step of the task at which Elliot balked was actually being carried out too well, and at the expense of the overall purpose. One might say that Elliot had become irrational concerning the larger frame of behavior, which pertained to his main priority, while within the smaller frames of behavior, which pertained to subsidiary tasks, his actions were unnecessarily detailed.

But he could not be counted on to perform an appropriate action when it was expected.

True, he was still physically capable and most of his mental capacities were intact. But his ability to reach decisions was impaired, as was his ability to make an effective plan for the hours ahead of him, let alone to plan for the months and years of his future.

The tragedy of this otherwise healthy and intelligent man was that he was neither stupid nor ignorant, and yet he acted often as if he were.

The machinery for his decision making was so flawed that he could no longer be an effective social being.

His problems were found not to result from “organic disease” or “neurological dysfunction”—in other words, brain disease—but instead to reflect “emotional” and “psychological” adjustment problems—in other words, mental trouble—and would be thus amenable to psychotherapy.

(The distinction between diseases of “brain” and “mind,” between “neurological” problems and “psychological” or “psychiatric” ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relation between brain and mind. Diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind, especially those that affect conduct and emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer. Individuals are to be blamed for their character flaws, defective emotional modulation, and so on; lack of willpower is supposed to be the primary problem.)

patients with marked abnormalities of social behavior can perform normally on many and even most intelligence tests, and clinicians and investigators have struggled for decades with this frustrating reality.

This was astounding. Try to imagine it. Try to imagine not feeling pleasure when you contemplate a painting you love or hear a favorite piece of music. Try to imagine yourself forever robbed of that possibility and yet aware of the intellectual contents of the visual or musical stimulus, and also aware that once it did give you pleasure. We might summarize Elliot’s predicament as to know but not to feel.

In other words, had he lost knowledge concerning social behavior, so that even with his normal reasoning mechanisms he would not be able to solve a problem? Or was he still in possession of the knowledge but no longer able to conjure it up and manipulate it? Or was he able to gain access to the knowledge but unable to operate on it and make a choice?

Elliot responded no differently from how any of us in the laboratory would have. His ethical judgments followed principles we all shared. He was aware of how social conventions applied to the problems. His financial decisions sounded reasonable. There was nothing especially sophisticated about the problems we set, but it was remarkable to discover, nonetheless, that Elliot did not perform abnormally. His real-life performance, after all, was a catalogue of violations in the domains covered by the problems. This dissociation between real-life failure and laboratory normalcy presented yet another challenge.

The defect appeared to set in at the late stages of reasoning, close to or at the point at which choice making or response selection must occur. In other words, whatever went wrong went wrong late in the process. Elliot was unable to choose effectively, or he might not choose at all, or choose badly. Remember how he would drift from a given task and spend hours sidetracked? As we are confronted by a task, a number of options open themselves in front of us and we must select our path correctly, time after time, if we are to keep on target. Elliot could no longer select that path. Why he could not is what we needed to discover.

Moreover, I was certain that in Elliot the defect was accompanied by a reduction in emotional reactivity and feeling.

I began to think that the cold-bloodedness of Elliot’s reasoning prevented him from assigning different values to different options, and made his decision-making landscape hopelessly flat. It might also be that the same cold-bloodedness made his mental landscape too shifty and unsustained for the time required to make response selections, in other words, a subtle rather than basic defect in working memory which might alter the remainder of the reasoning process required for a decision to emerge. Be that as it may, the attempt to understand both Elliot and Gage promised an entry into the neurobiology of rationality.

THERE NEVER HAS been any doubt that, under certain circumstances, emotion disrupts reasoning.

If emotion is pleasurable, we enjoy it as a luxury; if it is painful, we suffer it as an unwelcome intrusion. In either case, the sage will advise us, we should experience emotion and feeling in only judicious amounts. We should be reasonable.

For instance, a patient is more likely to prefer a treatment if told that 90 percent of those treated are alive five years later, than if told that 10 percent are dead. 1 Although the outcome is precisely the same, it is likely that the feelings aroused by the idea of death lead to the rejection of an option that would be endorsed in the other framing of the choice, in short, an inconsistent and irrational inference.

Reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behavior. The counterintuitive connection between absent emotion and warped behavior may tell us something about the biological machinery of reason.

To date we have studied twelve patients with prefrontal damage of the type seen in Elliot, and in none have we failed to encounter a combination of decision-making defect and flat emotion and feeling. The powers of reason and the experience of emotion decline together, and their impairment stands out in a neuropsychological profile within which basic attention, memory, intelligence, and language appear so intact that they could never be invoked to explain the patients’ failures in judgment. But the salient, concurrent impairment of reason and feeling does not arise only after prefrontal damage.

But in spite of his impressive physical health and commendable mental abilities, patient A never returned to work. He stayed home, formulating plans for his professional comeback but never implementing the simplest of those plans. Here was another life unraveling.

Patient A clearly exhibited the cognitive and behavioral characteristics I am trying to establish for what one might call the Phineas Gage matrix: after he sustained damage to the frontal cortices, his ability to choose the most advantageous course of action was lost, despite otherwise intact mental capacities; emotions and feelings were compromised.

Reward or punishment did not seem to influence his behavior.

The patient was neither happy nor sad, and his pleasure and pain both seemed short-lived.

Rigid and perseverant in their approach to life, they both were unable to organize future activity and hold gainful employment;

One way of describing their predicament is by saying that they never construct an appropriate theory about their persons, or about their person’s social role in the perspective of past and future. And what they cannot construct for themselves, they also cannot generate for others. They are bereft of a theory of their own mind and of the mind of those with whom they interact.

Extreme anxiety gave way to extreme calm. Their emotions seemed flat. They did not appear to suffer. The animated intellect which had produced incessant compulsions or rich delusions was quiet. The patients’ drive to respond and act, however wrongly, was muffled.

bilateral damage to prefrontal cortices is consistently associated with impairments of reasoning/ decision making and emotion/ feeling.

When impairments in reasoning/ decision making and emotion/ feeling stand out against an otherwise largely intact neuropsychological profile, the damage is most extensive in the ventromedial sector; moreover the personal/ social domain is the one most affected.

Those impairments, as well as the impairments in emotion/ feeling are accompanied by defects in attention and working memory detected by tests in which objects, words, or numbers are used.

The word—which derives from the Greek nosos, “disease,” and gnosis, “knowledge”—denotes the inability to acknowledge disease in oneself. Imagine a victim of a major stroke, entirely paralyzed in the left side of the body, unable to move hand and arm, leg and foot, face half immobile, unable to stand or walk. And now imagine that same person oblivious to the entire problem, reporting that nothing is possibly the matter, answering the question, “How do you feel?” with a sincere, “Fine.” (The term anosognosia has been used also to designate unawareness of blindness or aphasia.

The “denial” of illness results from the loss of a particular cognitive function. This loss of cognitive function depends on a particular brain system which can be damaged by a stroke or by various neurological diseases.

The lack of direct update on the real state of body and person is nothing less than astounding.

No less dramatic than the oblivion that anosognosic patients have regarding their sick limbs is the lack of concern they show for their overall situation, the lack of emotion they exhibit, the lack of feeling they report when questioned about it. The news that there was a major stroke, that the risk of further trouble in brain or heart looms large, or the news that they are suffering from an invasive cancer that has now spread to the brain—in short, the news that life is not likely to be the same, ever again—is usually received with equanimity, sometimes with gallows humor, but never with anguish or sadness, tears or anger, despair or panic. It is important to realize that if you give a comparable set of bad news to a patient with the mirror image damage in the left hemisphere the reaction is entirely normal. Emotion and feeling are nowhere to be found in anosognosic patients, and perhaps this is the only felicitous aspect of their otherwise tragic condition. Perhaps it is no surprise that these patients’ planning for the future, their personal and social decision-making, is profoundly impaired. Paralysis is perhaps the least of their troubles.

They certainly cannot construct an adequate theory for what is happening to them, for what may happen in the future, and for what others think of them. Just as important, they are unaware that their own theorizing is inadequate. When one’s own self-image is so compromised, it may not be possible to realize that the thoughts and actions of that self are no longer normal.

patients with prefrontal lesions appear neurologically normal (their movements, sensations, and language are intact; the disturbance resides with their impaired feelings and reasonings) and thus can engage in a variety of social interactions that will easily expose their defective reasoning. Patients with anosognosia, on the other hand, are more often than not considered sick, because of their blatant motor and sensory impairments, and are thus limited in the range of social interactions in which they can engage. In other words, their opportunity to place themselves in harm’s way is drastically reduced.

Why should they, if they are generally unaware of how badly off they are in the first place?

Anosognosics of the type I described here, then, have more than just a left-side paralysis of which they are not aware. They also have a defect in reasoning and decision making, and a defect in emotion and feeling.

One might say, metaphorically, that reason and emotion “intersect” in the ventromedial prefrontal cortices, and that they also intersect in the amygdala.

In short, there appears to be a collection of systems in the human brain consistently dedicated to the goal-oriented thinking process we call reasoning, and to the response selection we call decision making, with a special emphasis on the personal and social domain. This same collection of systems is also involved in emotion and feeling, and is partly dedicated to processing body signals.

In a series of revealing studies, Ronald Myers has shown that monkeys with bilateral prefrontal ablations (involving both the ventromedial and the dorsolateral sectors but sparing the cingulate region) do not maintain normal social relations within the monkey troop despite the fact that nothing in their physical appearance has changed. 21 These affected monkeys show greatly decreased grooming behavior (of themselves and of others); greatly reduced affective interactions with others, regardless of whether they are males, females or infants; diminished facial expressions and vocalizations; impaired maternal behavior; and sexual indifference. While they can move normally, they fail to relate to the other animals in the troop to which they belonged before the operation, and the other animals fail to relate to them. The other animals can, however, relate normally to monkeys that develop major physical defects such as paralysis but that do not have prefrontal damage. Although the paralytic monkeys seem more disabled than the monkeys with prefrontal damage, they seek and receive the support of their peers.

First, these systems are certainly involved in the processes of reason in the broad sense of the term. Specifically, they are involved in planning and deciding. Second, a subset of these systems is associated with planning and deciding behaviors that one might subsume under the rubric “personal and social.” There is a hint that these systems are related to the aspect of reason usually designated as rationality. Third, the systems we have identified play an important role in the processing of emotions. Fourth, the systems are needed to hold in mind, over an extended period of time, the image of a relevant but no longer present object.

*Part 2*

First, reaching a decision about the typical personal problem posed in a social environment, which is complex and whose outcome is uncertain, requires both broad-based knowledge and reasoning strategies to operate over such knowledge. The broad knowledge includes facts about objects, persons, and situations in the external world. But because personal and social decisions are inextricable from survival, the knowledge also includes facts and mechanisms concerning the regulation of the organism as a whole. The reasoning strategies revolve around goals, options for action, predictions of future out-come, and plans for implementation of goals at varied time scales.

Second, the processes of emotion and feeling are part and parcel of the neural machinery for biological regulation, whose core is constituted by homeostatic controls, drives, and instincts.

Third, because of the brain’s design, the requisite broad-based knowledge depends on numerous systems located in relatively separate brain regions rather than in one region. A large part of such knowledge is recalled in the form of images at many brain sites rather than at a single site. Although we have the illusion that everything comes together in a single anatomical theater, recent evidence suggests that it does not. Probably the relative simultaneity of activity at different sites binds the separate parts of the mind together.

Fourth, since knowledge can be retrieved only in distributed, parcellated manner, from sites in many parallel systems, the operation of reasoning strategies requires that the representation of myriad facts be held active in a broad parallel display for an extended period of time (in the very least for several seconds). In other words, the images over which we reason (images of specific objects, actions, and relational schemas; of words which help translate the latter into language form) not only must be “in focus”—something achieved by attention—but also must be “held active in mind”—something achieved by high-order working memory.

However, since the brain holds and retrieves knowledge in spatially segregated rather than integrated manner, they also require

attention and working memory so that the component of knowledge that is retrieved as a display of images can be manipulated in time.

If basic biological regulation is essential to the guidance of personal and social behavior, then a brain design likely to have prevailed in natural selection may have been one in which the subsystems responsible for reasoning and decision making would have remained intimately interlocked with those concerned with biological regulation, given their shared involvement in the business of survival.
My Personal Thoughts On This: The evolutionary basis on why our different neurological processess are mixed together instantaneously (emotion, thought, feeling, habit etc.)

What in the brain allows humans to behave rationally? How does it work?

There are two principal routes of interconnection. The route usually thought of first is made of sensory and motor peripheral nerves which carry signals from every part of the body to the brain, and from the brain to every part of the body. The other route, which comes less easily to mind although it is far older in evolution, is the bloodstream; it carries chemical signals such as hormones, neurotransmitters, and modulators.

Nearly every part of the body, every muscle, joint, and internal organ, can send signals to the brain via the peripheral nerves.

Those signals enter the brain at the level of the spinal cord or the brain stem, and eventually are carried inside the brain, from neural station to neural station, to the somatosensory cortices in the parietal lobe and insular regions.

Chemical substances arising from body activity can reach the brain via the bloodstream and influence the brain’s operation either directly or by activating special brain sites such as the subfornical organ.

In the opposite direction, the brain can act, through nerves, on all parts of the body.

The signals for the autonomic nervous system arise in the evolutionarily older regions (the amygdala, the cingulate, the hypothalamus, and the brain stem), while the signals for the musculoskeletal system arise in several motor cortices and subcortical motor nuclei, of different evolutionary ages.

The brain also acts on the body by manufacturing or ordering the manufacture of chemical substances released in the bloodstream, among them hormones, transmitters, and modulators.

When I say that body and brain form an indissociable organism,

The organism constituted by the brain-body partnership interacts with the environment as an ensemble, the interaction being of neither the body nor the brain alone. But complex organisms such as ours do more than just interact, more than merely generate the spontaneous or reactive external responses known collectively as behavior. They also generate internal responses, some of which constitute images (visual, auditory, somatosensory, and so on), which I postulate as the basis for mind.

Brains can have many intervening steps in the circuits mediating between stimulus and response, and still have no mind, if they do not meet an essential condition: the ability to display images internally and to order those images in a process called thought. (The images are not solely visual; there are also “sound images,” “olfactory images,” and so on.) My statement about behaving organisms can now be completed by saying that not all have minds, that is, not all have mental phenomena (which is the same as saying that not all have cognition or cognitive processes). Some organisms have both behavior and cognition. Some have intelligent actions but no mind. No organism seems to have mind but no action.

My view then is that having a mind means that an organism forms neural representations which can become images, be manipulated in a process called thought, and eventually influence behavior by helping predict the future, plan accordingly, and choose the next action.

From an evolutionary perspective, it is not the other way around. If there had been no body, there would have been no brain.

Would you not want to merge the signals from different sensory sources, say, vision and hearing, as rapidly as possible so that the brain could generate “integrated representations” of things simultaneously seen and heard?

Would you not want to connect those representations to motor controls so that the brain could respond effectively to them?

The natural question is: What happens in all those “interposed” structures, what does all that complexity buy us? The answer is that activity there, together with that of the input and output areas, momentarily constructs and stealthily manipulates the images in our minds. On the basis of those images, about which I will say more in the pages ahead, we can interpret the signals brought in at the early sensory cortices so that we can organize them as concepts and categorize them. We can acquire strategies for reasoning and decision making; and we can select a motor response from the menu available in our brain, or formulate a new motor response, a willed, deliberated composition of actions, which can range from pounding on a table, to hugging a child, to writing a letter to the editor, or to playing Mozart on the piano.

Daniel Dennett has written extensively about this concept which he dubbed “Cartesian theater,” and has argued persuasively, on cognitive grounds, that the Cartesian theater cannot exist. 2 I too, on neuroscientific grounds, maintain that it is a false intuition.

It is perhaps more fruitful to think that our strong sense of mind integration is created from the concerted action of large-scale systems by synchronizing sets of neural activity in separate brain regions, in effect a trick of timing.

If activity occurs in anatomically separate brain regions, but if it does so within approximately the same window of time, it is still possible to link the parts behind the scenes, as it were, and create the impression that it all happens in the same place.

But when it comes to the processes of global attention and working memory, human studies as well as animal experiments suggest that the prefrontal cortices and some limbic system structures (the anterior cingulate) are essential.

The factual knowledge required for reasoning and decision making comes to the mind in the form of images.

If you look out the window at the autumn landscape, or listen to the music playing in the background, or run your fingers over a smooth metal surface, or read these words, line after line down this page, you are perceiving, and thereby forming images of varied sensory modalities. The images so formed are called perceptual images.

Those images, which occur as you conjure up a remembrance of things past, are known as recalled images, so as to distinguish them from the perceptual variety.

How do we come to create these marvelous constructions? It appears they are concocted by a complex neural machinery of perception, memory, and reasoning.

the self is not the infamous homunculus, a little person inside our brain perceiving and thinking about the images the brain forms. It is, rather, a perpetually re-created neurobiological state.

But the neural self need not be homuncular at all. What should cause some fear, actually, is the idea of a selfless cognition.

whenever we recall a given object, or face, or scene, we do not get an exact reproduction but rather an interpretation, a newly reconstructed version of the original. In addition, as our age and experience change, versions of the same thing evolve. None of this is compatible with rigid, facsimile representation, as the British psychologist Frederic Bartlett noted several decades ago, when he first proposed that memory is essentially reconstructive.

If you are achromatopsic, you can no longer imagine color in your mind. If I ask you to imagine a banana, you will be able to picture its shape but not its color; you will see it in shades of gray.

If “color knowledge” were stored elsewhere, in a system separate from the one that supports “color perception,” achromatopsic patients would imagine color even when they cannot perceive it in an external object. But they do not.

What dispositional representations hold in store in their little commune of synapses is not a picture per se, but a means to reconstitute “a picture.” If you have a dispositional representation

for the face of Aunt Maggie, that representation contains not her face as such, but rather the firing patterns which trigger the momentary reconstruction of an approximate representation of Aunt Maggie’s face, in early visual cortices.

There is not just one hidden formula for this reconstruction. Aunt Maggie as a complete person does not exist in one single site of your brain. She is distributed all over it, in the form of many dispositional representations, for this and that. And when you conjure up remembrances of things Maggie, and she surfaces in various early cortices (visual, auditory, and so on) in topographic representation, she is still present only in separate views during the time window in which you construct some meaning of her person.

Dispositional representations constitute our full repository of knowledge, encompassing both innate knowledge and knowledge acquired by experience.

The point, then, is that images are probably the main content of our thoughts, regardless of the sensory modality in which they are generated and regardless of whether they are about a thing or a process involving things; or about words or other symbols, in a given language, which correspond to a thing or process.

But the neocortex cannot produce images if the old-fashioned subterranean of the brain (hypothalamus, brain stem) is not intact and cooperative. This arrangement may give one pause. Here we have innate circuits whose function is to regulate body function and to ensure the organism’s survival, achieved by controlling the internal biochemical operations of the endocrine system, immune system, and viscera, and drives and instincts. Why should these circuits interfere with the shaping of the more modern and plastic ones concerned with representing our acquired experiences? The answer to this important question lies in the fact that both the records of experiences and the responses to them, if they are to be adaptive, must be evaluated and shaped by a fundamental set of preferences of the organism that consider survival paramount.

genes also specify that the innate circuits must exert a powerful influence on virtually the entire set of circuits that can be modified by experience.

That influence is carried out in good part by “modulator” neurons acting on the remainder of the circuitry. These modulator neurons are located in the brain stem and the basal forebrain, and they are influenced by the interactions of the organism at any given moment. Modulator neurons distribute neurotransmitters (such as dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin and acetylcholine) to widespread regions of the cerebral cortex and subcortical nuclei. This clever arrangement can be described as follows: (1) the innate regulatory circuits are involved in the business of organism survival and because of that they are privy to what is happening in the more modern sectors of the brain; (2) the goodness and badness of situations is regularly signaled to them; and (3) they express their inherent reaction to goodness and badness by influencing how the rest of the brain is shaped, so that it can assist survival in the most efficacious way.

In general, drives and instincts operate either by generating a particular behavior directly or by inducing physiological states that lead individuals to behave in a particular way, mindlessly or not.

Emotions and feelings, which are central to the view of rationality I am proposing, are a powerful manifestation of drives and instincts, part and parcel of their workings.

Instinctual regulation might be explained in a simplified way by this example: Several hours after a meal your blood sugar level drops, and neurons in the hypothalamus detect the change; activation of the pertinent innate pattern makes the brain alter the body state so that the probability for correction can be increased; you feel hungry, and initiate actions to end your hunger; you eat, and the ingestion of food brings about a correction in blood sugar; finally, the hypothalamus again detects a change in blood sugar, this time an increase, and the appropriate neurons place the body in the state whose experience constitutes the feeling of satiety.

The goal of the entire process was saving your body. The signal to initiate the process came from your body. The signals that entered your consciousness, in order to force you to save your body, also came from your body. As the cycle concluded, the signals that told you that your body was no longer in danger came from your body. You might say that this is government for the body and by the body, although it is sensed and managed by the brain.

In other words, the organism has a basic set of preferences—or criteria, biases, or values. Under their influence and the agency of experience, the repertoire of things categorized as good or bad grows rapidly, and the ability to detect new good and bad things grows exponentially.

Biological regulation related to the brain stem and hypothalamus is complemented by controls in the limbic system. This is not the place to discuss the intricate anatomy and detailed function of this sizable brain sector, but it should be noted that the limbic system participates also in the enactment of drives and instincts and has an especially important role in emotions and feelings.

Consequently, as might be expected, there is a documented brain-body interaction, and we may glean perhaps less visible mind-body interactions. Consider the following example: Chronic mental stress, a state related to processing in numerous brain systems at the level of neocortex, limbic system, and hypothalamus, seems to lead to overproduction of a chemical, calcitonin gene-related peptide, or CGRP, in nerve terminals within the skin. 2 As a result, CGRP excessively coats the surface of Langerhans cells, an immune-related cell whose job it is to capture infectious agents and deliver them to lymphocytes so that the immune system can counteract their presence. If completely coated by CGRP, the Langerhans cells are disabled and can no longer perform their guardian function. The end result is that the body is more vulnerable to infection, now that a major entryway is less well defended. And there are other examples of mind-body interaction: Sadness and anxiety can notably alter the regulation of sexual hormones, causing not only changes in sexual drive but also variations in menstrual cycle. Bereavement, again a state dependent on brainwide processing, leads to a depression of the immune system such that individuals are more prone to infection and, whether as a direct result or not, more likely to develop certain types of cancer. 3 One can die of a broken heart.

Thought processes can slow down or speed up; the profusion of recalled images can decrease or increase; the creation of novel combinations of images can be enhanced or shut down. The ability to concentrate on a particular mind content fluctuates accordingly.

What it can do there is nothing short of the effect of legendary elixirs.

More important, for my story, it facilitates social interactions and induces bonding between mating partners.

The hypothalamus, the brain stem, and the limbic system intervene in body regulation and in all neural processes on which mind phenomena are based, for example, perception, learning, recall, emotion and feeling, and—as I shall propose later—reasoning and creativity.

The interweaving occurs in biological tissue and uses chemical and electrical signaling, all within Descartes’ res extensa (the physical realm in which he includes the body and the surrounding environment but not the nonphysical soul, which belongs to the res cogitans).

It should be clear that although culture and civilization arise from the behavior of biological individuals, the behavior was generated in collectives of individuals interacting in specific environments. Culture and civilization could not have arisen from single individuals and thus cannot be reduced to biological mechanisms and, even less, can they be reduced to a subset of genetic specifications. Their comprehension demands not just general biology and neurobiology but the methodologies of the social sciences as well.

For most ethical rules and social conventions, regardless of how elevated their goal, I believe one can envision a meaningful link to simpler goals and to drives and instincts. Why should this be so? Because the consequences of achieving or not achieving a rarefied social goal contribute (or are perceived as contributing), albeit indirectly, to survival and to the quality of that survival.

The truth of the feeling (which concerns how what I do and say matches what I have in mind), the magnitude of the feeling, and the beauty of the feeling, are not endangered by realizing that survival, brain, and proper education have a lot to do with the reasons why we experience such feelings.

The same applies to a considerable extent to altruism and free will. Realizing that there are biological mechanisms behind the most sublime human behavior does not imply a simplistic reduction to the nuts and bolts of neurobiology.

The neural mechanisms supporting the suprain-stinctual repertoire may be similar in their overall formal design to those governing biological drives, and may be constrained by them. Yet they require the intervention of society to become whatever they become, and thus are related as much to a given culture as to general neurobiology. Moreover, out of that dual constraint, suprainstinctual survival strategies generate something probably unique to humans: a moral point of view that, on occasion, can transcend the interests of the immediate group and even the species.

The cycle continues, certainly in humans, and its next step is the feeling of the emotion in connection to the object that excited it, the realization of the nexus between object and emotional body state. Now, it may be asked, why would anyone need to become cognizant of such a relation? Why complicate matters and bring consciousness into this process, if there is already a means to respond adaptively at an automated level? The answer is that consciousness buys an enlarged protection policy. Consider this: If you come to know that animal or object or situation X causes fear, you will have two ways of behaving toward X. The first way is innate; you do not control it. Moreover, it is not specific to X; a large number of creatures, objects, and circumstances can cause the response. The second way is based on your own experience and is specific to X. Knowing about X allows you to think ahead and predict the probability of its being present in a given environment, so that you can avoid X, preemptively, rather than just have to react to its presence in an emergency.
My Personal Thoughts On This: Avoidance behaviors

In short, feeling your emotional states, which is to say being conscious of emotions, offers you flexibility of response based on the particular history of your interactions with the environment.

At a nonconscious level, networks in the prefrontal cortex automatically and involuntarily respond to signals arising from the processing of the above images.

In conclusion, emotion is the combination of a mental evaluative process, simple or complex, with dispositional responses to that process, mostly toward the body proper, resulting in an emotional body state, but also toward the brain itself (neurotransmitter nuclei in brain stem), resulting in additional mental changes. Note that, for the moment, I leave out of emotion the perception of all the changes that constitute the emotional response. As you will soon discover, I reserve the term feeling for the experience of those changes.

all emotions generate feelings if you are awake

and alert, but not all feelings originate in emotions.

That process of continuous monitoring, that experience of what your body is doing while thoughts about specific contents roll by, is the essence of what I call a feeling.

The substrate of a feeling is completed by the changes in cognitive processes that are simultaneously induced by neurochemical substances

If you try for a moment to imagine what it would be like to be without background feelings, you will have no doubt about the notion I am introducing. I submit that without them the very core of your representation of self would be broken.

They assist the deliberation by highlighting some options (either dangerous or favorable), and eliminating them rapidly from subsequent consideration.

Unstarred

Dunk (exclude from study)

Descartes' Error

Review Questions

Todos

Sensemaker