Antonio Damasio
From Psy3242
http://www.counterbalance.net/stanford/damasio1-body.html
Contents |
Overview
Antonio Damasio, a Portuguese born behavioral neurologist and neuroscientist, is currently a professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California. Before moving to the USC, Dr. Damasio was the head of neurology as well as a professor at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics from 1976-2005. In addition, to being a prominent researcher in his field, Dr. Damasio is also a best selling author of several books. He is the recipient of several awards including the Arnold Pfeffer Prize, the Reenpaa Prize in Neuroscience, Kappers Neuroscience Medal, and the Beaumont Medal
Life and Work
Dr. Damasio studied medicine at the University of Lisbon and conducted research at the Aphasia Research Center in Boston, Massachusetts. Most of his research has been about the neurobiology of the brain in an attempt to understand better the placement of such activities as memory, language, emotion, and decision-making. In particular, Dr. Damasio's research has demonstrated the role that emotions play in decision-making and helped to explain the neural basis for emotions.
Books
Dr. Damasio's books deal with his specific area of interest of emotions and feelings and their locations in the brain. In addition, Dr. Damasio also investigates the relationship between philosophy and neurobiology. His books include:
• Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
• The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
• Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain
In Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling of the Brain, hypothesizes that biology might provide guidelines for ethics. He writes: feelings are "mental sensors of the organism's interior...joy and sorry and other feelings are largely ideas of the body in the process of maneuvering itself into optimal survival." His other books also deal with the body-mind relationship as a way to understand how to provide better treatment.
Views
According to Dr. Damasio, "Emotions are unlearned reactions to events. When you laugh or cry, it's not a reaction that you have learned...it's a reaction that you share with the rest of humanity and with many non-human species." Through his studies of the neurobiology of feeling and emotion in both healthy and brain damaged individuals, Dr. Damasio has concluded that, because the links between emotions and the brain are close, injuries to specific regions will prevent patients from experiencing specific types of emotions. The argument that emotions are separate from the body, according to Dr. Damasio, is ridiculous.
Somatic marker hypothesis
In the past, both science and philosophy have emphasized the role of reason and downplayed the value of emotions in making decisions. The somatic marker hypothesis, formulated by Dr. Damasio, posits that decision making is a process which not only heavily involves emotions, but in fact depends on emotions. An emotionally detached person, therefore, is unable to make as many good decisions as a person who is in touch with their emotions. Both cognitive and emotional processes are involved in assessing a situation before making a decision. In complex situations with no clear right and/or wrong answer, the cognitive processes can become overloaded. It is in these situations that the somatic markers become imperative. Somatic markers refer to the associations made between the environment and a certain physiological states. Somatic markers are believed to be stored in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. In the future when hard decisions need to be made, these associations, particularly reward and punishment associated experiences, bias cognitive processing and direct it to select the best action. Damage to the amygdale and/or ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the essential components to process, will interrupt the development of the somatic markers and therefore affect how effective they are in decision making. To help prove this theory, experiments were conducted using the Iowa gambling task. The aim of the task was to create a situation that resembled as much as possible as real-life decision making, in that it involved uncertain outcomes and reward and punishment. Subjects are shown four virtual decks of cards on a computer screen. They must choose one card at a time. For some cards they will win money and for others they will lose money. So, for example, cards chosen from pack A and B result in large immediate gain but also large long term lost. Cards chosen from C and D, however, result in smaller gains over time but less long term lost. The goal is for participants to realize that choosing cards from C and D is the best decision. The task, though, does not rely on long debates over what card should be chosen, but instead relies on the gut reaction of the participant. The task measures emotion-based learning and studies have deficits in the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex provide support for the somatic-markers hypothesis. Critics of the theory, however, argue that decision making via the somatic-markers would be inefficient and offer several alternatives.
