Neuroscience: Although we are, probably, the only animal blessed, or cursed, with self-consciousness, still we do not know ourselves. And it is just as well. We could not bear it were we constantly to dwell on our inner workings, writes Although we are, probably, the only animal blessed, or cursed, with self-consciousness, still we do not know ourselves. And it is just as well. We could not bear it were we constantly to dwell on our inner workings, writes John Banville.
For us, introspects though we are, everything tends outwards. "We live amid surfaces," Emerson wisely writes, "and the true art of life is to skate well on them". Heart, liver, lights, all work away at their dark and desperate business, taken for granted by us, their dependants. And so all goes on in more or less happy ignorance.
That, at least, is what we used to think.
Descartes made a strict and tragic division between body and soul, the one decried, the other exalted. For the Cartesian, we are trapped in our bodies like fastidious guests forced to put up at a dosshouse, our eyes and noses turned heavenward away from the grossness of mere flesh. Nietzsche railed against such self-deluding scission, contending that we are not, as we like to think, priceless mind trapped in worthless body; we are body, just as much as we are mind. He traced the separation far back beyond Descartes, to Plato and Plato's Socrates, who insisted on the illusory nature of the merely superficial and the existence elsewhere, in some far-off blue empyrean, of ideal forms the perfection of which the mundane crudities among which we are forced to move may only ape.
Antonio Damasio, a Portuguese by birth, is a neuroscientist. He is M. W. Van Allen Distinguished Professor and head of the department of neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, and Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. Do not be frightened; he is also a wonderful writer, with a clear, approachable, witty and poetic prose style. His first book, Descartes' Error, published in 1994, was an international bestseller, and his second, The Feeling of What Happens, five years later, was described by theatre director Peter Brook as "marvellous - a major work of meaning and importance". Although The Feeling of What Happens, in which he addresses the Nietzschean question of how we become what we are - the subtitle is Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness - is the most subtle and the most poetically achieved of his books, new readers would do best to start where he started, with his genially corrective assault on Descartes.
In his introduction to Descartes' Error, Damasio offered the propositions "that reason may not be as pure as most of us think it is or wish it were", that "certain aspects of the process of emotion and feeling are indispensable for rationality", and that "human reason depends on several brain systems, working in concert across many levels of neuronal organisation, rather than on a single brain centre". The book goes on to propound what to the layman seems a highly radical notion, namely,
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.
In other words, the mind makes sense of itself and of the world, and of its place in the world, by a continuous and immensely complex process of what Damasio calls "body-mapping". Or, as he more lyrically puts it, "The soul breathes through the body . . ."
In his new book, Looking for Spinoza, Damasio begins with a visit to The Hague, and the house on Paviljoensgracht where the great philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, lived out his final years, and where, in 1677, after working for most of his adult life as a lens-grinder, he died of consumption aggravated by the accumulation of glass dust in his lungs. Damasio had read Spinoza's posthumous masterpiece, the Ethics, when he was an adolescent, and in later life returned to the work of this great synthesiser, discovering to his surprise that much in it was relevant to his neurological investigations. Spinoza rejected Cartesian dualism, holding, on the contrary, that mind and matter are two attributes of the single substance of the world, which ultimately is God. What in particular caught Damasio's attention, he writes, was the Spinozan doctrine that "the human mind is the idea of the human body", a notion he had already encountered in the work of William James, who at the close of the 19th century had conjectured that emotions arise from perceptions of body states.
The radical hypothesis at the heart of Looking for Spinoza is, as the author simply has it, that "emotional states come first and feelings after". This, as a moment's thought will show, turns on its head our commonly held assumption that feelings give rise to emotions, or, more commonly still, that feelings and emotions are the same thing. Damasio gives it as his "current view" - note the scientist's instinctive caution in the face of his own, necessarily temporal, beliefs - that "feelings are the expression of human flourishing or human distress, as they occur in mind and body". Further on, he makes an important distinction:
It is true that the common usage of the word emotion tends to encompass the notion of feeling. But in our attempt to understand the complex chain of events that begins with emotion and ends up in feeling, we can be helped by a principled separation between the part of the process that is made public and the part that remains private. For the purposes of my work I call the former part emotion and the latter part feeling. . .
Later on in the book, however, when he has exhausted the investigative uses of a separation of feeling and emotion, and has got down to the living cells of which the brain and its information highways through the body are constituted, which "are not likely to be indifferent pieces of hardware", he rolls emotion and feeling back into one, under the Spinozan rubric of "affect".
The question which we might be urged to put, he puts for us: why do emotions precede feelings?
My answer is simple: We have emotions first and feelings after because evolution came up with emotions first and feelings later. Emotions are built from simple reactions that easily promote the survival of an organism and thus could easily prevail in evolution.In brief, those whom the gods wanted to save they first made smart . . .
It is important to keep in mind - apt phrase - the fact that the hypotheses with which Damasio presents us - confronts us, one might almost say - are not philosophical speculations, or not purely so; he, and his wife and colleague, Hanna Damasio, are working neuroscientists, and most of the speculations that he puts forward spring from experiences in the consulting room and the laboratory. One of the most striking, and most unsettling, passages in Looking for Spinoza concerns a patient at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, a 65-year-old woman who was being treated for Parkinson's disease by having tiny electrodes implanted at various points along her brainstem. When activated, one electrode greatly relieved the symptoms of the disease. However, when the current was passed through another contact point, the patient suddenly began to display physical signs of sadness, casting her eyes down and leaning to one side and taking on a mournful expression. Seconds later, she began to weep uncontrollably. Questioned by the doctor in charge, she spoke of feeling worthless, despairing, suicidal. When the current was switched off, however, she reverted almost at once to her normal, placid demeanour. She had, she said, felt terrible, but she did not know why.
The doctor realised that the electrode had been applied in the wrong place, so thatthe electrical current had passed into an area of the brainstem which stimulates actions which, working together, produce the emotion of sadness.
"The display of sadness," Damasio writes, "in all its spectacular complexity, came truly out of nowhere. No less importantly, sometimes after the display of sadness was fully organised and in progress, the patient began to have a feeling of sadness."
The patient's mind, busily engaged in the endless process of monitoring and mapping her body states, had been temporarily deceived by the emotion of sadness, produced by the movement of facial muscles, the lowering of eyes, etc., into experiencing the feeling of sadness.
Damasio is alive to the implications of the incident and others like it being encountered in present-day neuroscientific research. As he admits, "modern biology is now revealing that nature is even more cruel and indifferent than we previously thought". However, fine physician that he is, he refuses to despair. "While humans are equal-opportunity victims of nature's casual, unpremeditated evil," he writes, "we are not obliged to accept it without response". He recommends a combative stance against life's emotional ills, seeing in such a stance, "the promise that we shall never feel alone as long as our concern is the well-being of others".
Like all scientists, Damasio believes that on balance knowledge is always better than ignorance, and that the discoveries that he and his colleagues are making will bring about profound changes in medicine and even, perhaps, in human behaviour. Yet if he abjures despair, neither does he give in to deluded optimism, and allows the last words to the sage of the Paviljoensgracht:
I believe the new knowledge may change the human playing field. And this is why, all things considered, in the middle of much sorrow and some joy, we can have hope, an affect for which Spinoza, in all his bravery, did not have as much regard as we common mortals must. He defined it as follows: "Hope is nothing else but an inconstant joy, arising from the image of something future or past, whose outcome to some extent we doubt."
Alan Gilsenan's adaptation of John Banville's novel, The Book of Evidence, continues at the Gate Theatre, Dublin until next Saturday
Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. By Antonio Damasio William Heinemann, 355pp, £20