Very few brain scientists would have enough clout, not to mention the confidence, to coax a renowned concert pianist like Maria Joao Pires into donning electrodes for a neurological experiment.
It took the virtuosic reputation of Dr. Antonio Damasio, a pioneer in the study of the emotions, to get the soloist into his laboratory at the University of Iowa. He wanted to test Pires’ assertion that she could, at will, intensify or flatten her body’s emotional response to music, a remarkable claim that contradicted Damasio’s belief that such processes are beyond conscious control.
To Damasio’s shock, Pires was right.
“We thought it was just a great romantic idea from somebody who knows nothing about the brain,” Damasio said during a recent interview.
The unusual experiment taps into the theme of Damasio’s latest work, which seeks to explain how the brain and body conspire to produce consciousness — the “music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all,” in the words of T.S. Eliot.
Capturing the essence of human experience might sound too ambitious even for a neurologist. But Damasio is a rare find among researchers. Grounded in clinical observation and hard science, his work ventures into cultural and philosophical terrain that he believes one must traverse to understand the mind.
“He’s almost unique,” said David Hubel, a Harvard neurobiologist who shared the Nobel Prize in 1981 for his work on brain development. “His real passion is understanding the big picture of brain function. That puts him in a different category than many neurologists, who tend to focus on one problem involving chemicals or synapses.”
A broad audience embraced Damasio’s 1994 book “Descartes’ Error,” a meditation on the intimate neurological links between emotion and reason. That work, now translated into 17 languages, surely ranks among the few books about the brain to have directly inspired poetry (Judith Strasser’s “On Reading `Descartes’ Error’ “) and even a full-length concerto for piano and orchestra (“Body Loops,” by New York composer Bruce Adolphe).
Damasio’s preoccupation with how emotion and gut feelings shape brain function is at the core of his new book on consciousness, “The Feeling of What Happens.”
It is his contention that a crucial element of consciousness is the feeling each person has that he or she possesses a unified self, a concept some neuroscientists consider an elaborate illusion staged by the brain.
“The fact that the self exists, illusory or not, requires an explanation,” Damasio said. “If it is illusory, everything is illusory.”
Damasio’s ideas about the brain often spring directly from the clinical patients he sees as head of the neurology department at Iowa. Unlike many philosophers or biologists who theorize about the mind, Damasio regularly witnesses the many ways brain damage robs patients of their abilities.
To illustrate the value of emotions for survival, for instance, he recounts the case of S., a patient who fell into a dangerous Pollyanna-like existence after losing use of the brain areas that impart fear. Friends and romantic partners often took advantage of her utter blindness to the subtle cues in speech and facial expression that suggest someone should not be trusted.
When not in Iowa City or delivering one of his frequent lectures around the world, Damasio retreats to the high-rise Chicago apartment he shares with his wife and research collaborator, Hanna.
“My interest in mind and brain is really a curiosity about how human beings think in general,” Damasio said. “In fact, before I even thought about how to go about researching these questions, I thought probably the thing to be was a writer or a playwright — some career that deals with character, motivations, the reasons people act in certain ways. You know, one can say that somebody like Shakespeare is a great precursor to a lot of the activity going on in cognitive science today.”
That interest in plumbing questions of character continued to provoke Damasio. After doing post-graduate research with the Harvard neurologist Norman Geschwind, Damasio said, he chose Iowa — where he could deal with actual patients — as an ideal place to develop a research program fashioned around the study of individuals.
Damasio, now 55, began to wade into issues of consciousness while formulating his ideas on how emotion affects decision-making in the brain.
At Iowa, Damasio saw a number of patients who had suffered damage to a part of the brain located just behind the forehead, called the prefrontal cortex. He found that while such patients were intelligent and had normal memory abilities, their decisions seemed no longer to be shaped by the parts of the brain responsible for emotion.
Rather than making such people more coolly efficient and rational, however, the change had disastrous fallout. The patients no longer cared about the consequences of their decisions, and they often chose reckless paths.
One striking illustration: the celebrated 1848 case of Phineas Gage, a railroad foreman who miraculously survived a workplace accident that sent an iron rod through his head. Gage retained his sharp intellect but became socially inept and unable to hold down a job.
The case had a familiar ring. Hanna Damasio, an authority on brain anatomy, reconstructed the rod’s path through Gage’s brain using computer imaging and measurements of Gage’s damaged skull, which had been preserved at Harvard Medical School. The Damasios were not surprised to find that the rod had shot directly through Gage’s prefrontal lobe.
That pattern emerged again in the laboratory. In an intriguing 1997 experiment, Antonio Damasio had research volunteers play a card game in which they could draw from one of four decks; each card they drew brought either a play money reward or a penalty. Most people learned after playing for a while that two of the decks were stacked with large rewards and even larger penalties, which produced net losses in the long run.
When Damasio had patients with damage to their prefrontal lobes play the game, they kept drawing from the risky decks even after they recognized the pattern, saying they thought it was “more exciting.”
What the brain-damaged patients lacked, Damasio concluded, was an intuition or “gut feeling” about the decks that they could apply in their decisions. The experiment also revealed the process of intuition in normal people who played the game. Before these normal subjects developed a conscious hunch about which decks to avoid, skin measurements showed they were already sweating more heavily as they contemplated the bad decks, indicating some preconscious anxiety about the bad option.
The importance of such findings goes beyond showing the links between emotion and reason. That’s because emotions are not just a particular kind of brain experience — they bubble up from the chemical chatter between brain and body, hinging on such visceral changes as an elevated heart rate or hormonal activity. Although the process starts with signals from the brain, emotions themselves are mixtures of brain states and bodily experiences, Damasio believes.
If gut feelings are essential to making good decisions, then the body as a whole plays a crucial role in the reasoning process.
That notion, which Damasio called the “somatic marker” hypothesis, spurred a shift in thinking for many brain theorists once Damasio articulated his ideas in “Descartes’ Error.” The proposal may have gained even more credence in recent years thanks to evidence that the stomach contains a nervous system capable of learning and memory, called the “brain in the gut” by some experts.
One who saw the light was Daniel Dennett, director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.
“The way the brain puts some of its policies to the vote of the body is something I’d way underestimated before I read Tony’s work,” said Dennett, who incorporated the idea into his recent book, “Kinds of Minds.”
In a similar way, Damasio said, he wants to inject a sense of the body’s role into theories about consciousness.
The basic texture of our inner lives depends to a huge extent on the constant flow of signals from the body, according to Damasio. For example, people with “locked-in syndrome,” a type of paralysis so complete that they can communicate only through subtle eye movements, report a surprising lack of terror about their condition. The reason, Damasio said, is that such people have no way of using the body “as a theater for emotional realization.”
The rudiments of consciousness can emerge even without extensive memory. One of the fascinating clinical characters from Damasio’s recent work is a brain-damaged patient he refers to as David. Twenty years ago, a bout of encephalitis destroyed a wide swath of David’s temporal lobe, depriving him of the ability to lay down new memories and wiping clean virtually all of his recollections from early childhood on.
Although David does not consciously recognize anyone, including his family, Damasio said, he has normal conversations and can stay absorbed in a task for up to several hours.
His experience suggests that there are several biologically distinct levels to consciousness. In David’s case, brain damage left only the fleeting awareness that Damasio calls core consciousness.
Yet not only can David carry on coherent conversations, but he demonstrates a somewhat consistent character from one day to the next.
Those glimmers of personality suggested an experiment to see if David could learn unconscious preferences, despite his daunting memory problem.
For five straight days, a researchers in Damasio’s lab treated David curtly and gave him mind-numbingly boring psychological tests to perform. Over the same period, a different person treated David with uncommon kindness.
Later, researchers showed David photographs of the “good guy” and the “bad guy” and asked which one of them he considered his friend. Although he neither recognized the people nor recalled any contact with them, he chose the good guy 80 percent of the time.
Damasio believes most people harbor an array of such unconscious preferences.
In fact, much of Damasio’s work winds up de-emphasizing consciousness as a “mid-level” human ability. He points to evidence that animals such as gorillas and elephants seem to have some level of self-awareness and even autobiographical memory of the type that patients like David lack.
“I don’t think (consciousness) is a defining feature of humans at all,” Damasio said.
