Summary
From Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain by Antonio Damasio
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. 1
Additional Notes
That there are in effect two feedback loops that take place when we feel something. There is the sensational/bodily experience - an ‘image of the body - that the disposition creates via complex neural pathways and regulated by neurochemicals in juxtaposition/separated combination with mental images or dispositions (a melody, a face).
We are biological, brain-body regulatory mechanisms, and that is how we operate even at highly sophisticated levels - interactions between sensation and mental disposition.
‘Images’ create a limbic, somatosensory response, which in itself feeds back into the brain and activation of neurotransmitter nuclei in the brain stem, which then release chemical messages.
Feeling as continuous monitoring of the body as a feedback loop for mental images and dispositions:
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.2
These feelings and representations must exist with reference to the bodily experience (in fact I think in this chapter he is specifically referring to how dispositions refer to or stimulate patterns elsewhere in the brain - how it relates to ‘self’ isn’t actually quite clear from what follows in that chapter):
In other words, if our brains would simply generate fine topographically organized representations and do nothing else with those representations, I doubt we would ever be conscious of them as images. How would we know they are our images? Subjectivity, a key feature of consciousness, would be missing from such a design. Other conditions must be met.
In essence those neural representations must be correlated with those which, moment by moment, constitute the neural basis for the self. This issue will surface again in chapters 7 and 10, but let me say at this point that 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. Years of justified attack on the homunculus concept have made many theorists equally fearful of the concept of self. But the neural self need not be homuncular at all. What should cause some fear, actually, is the idea of a selfless cognition.3
Distinction between dispositional images and images in the mind - dispositional images can fire into the visual cortext to create mental images in Damasio’s thesis. Dispositional knowledge are constituted by all parts of our brain and body response systems.
Dispositional representations constitute our full repository of knowledge, encompassing both innate knowledge and knowledge acquired by experience. Innate knowledge is based on dispositional representations in hypothalamus, brain stem, and limbic system. You can conceptualize it as commands about biological regulation which are required for survival (e.g., the control of metabolism, drives, and instincts). They control numerous processes, but by and large they do not become images in the mind. These will be discussed in the next chapter. 4
Footnotes
-
Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (p. 109). (Function). Kindle Edition. ↩
-
Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (p. 113). (Function). Kindle Edition. ↩
-
Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (p. 83). (Function). Kindle Edition. ↩
-
Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (pp. 86-87). (Function). Kindle Edition. ↩