Descartes' Error
The somatic marker hypothesis. Emotion as necessary to reason rather than opposed to it.
Emotions, feelings and biological regulation all play a role in human reason. The lowly orders of our organism are in the loop of high reason.
Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, builds his case from patients whose lives fell apart after injury to the frontal lobes. Intelligence, memory and language survived intact, yet these men and women could no longer decide, plan or hold a life together. Working outward from the nineteenth-century case of Phineas Gage and from his own patient Elliot, Damasio traces how damage that severs feeling from thought ruins judgment while leaving measured intelligence untouched.
Published in 1994, the book grounds its claims in anatomy, lesion studies and the daily failures of real patients rather than in argument alone. It gives the consulting room a physiological account of why a client can reason flawlessly about a decision and still be unable to make it, and why bodily states carry information a person cannot reach by deliberation. For therapists who work with affect, it offers a neurological language for what the body registers before the mind speaks.
About the author
Antonio Damasio
Antonio Damasio, born 1944, is a Portuguese-American neurologist and neuroscientist and professor at the University of Southern California, where he directs the Brain and Creativity Institute. His research links emotion, feeling, and bodily states to reasoning and consciousness. In Descartes' Error he set out the somatic marker hypothesis, which holds that emotion-linked bodily signals guide decision-making. For psychodynamic clinicians, his account of affect as central to thought and the self offers a physiological counterpart to the emphasis on emotional life.
Details
- 1994
- English
- Vintage
- Vintage, 1994
- 352
- 9780099501640