Spring 1995 Volume 4, Number 1
by Manfred Spitzer, M.D., Ph.D.
Cognitive Neuroscience is advancing at an ever-increasing pace. It is the integrated effort of a variety of disciplines to understand how the brain produces what we experience as the mind.
In the middle of the Decade of the Brain, a well-known neurologist, Antonio Damasio, has set out to inform the general public how the insights from neurobiology may change our views on who and what we are, in a book somewhat mistakenly entitled Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (Putnam, NY, 1994; 312 pp., $24.95).
The book begins with a detailed discussion of the now-famous case of Phineas Gage, who suffered from the emotional and behavioral consequences of a severe injury to his frontal lobes. Damasio uses this and similar cases to illustrate a point he later follows up in more detail, i.e., that emotion and reason are tied together closely, and that the bond consists of nothing but our entire body.
He calls this idea the "somatic market hypothesis," which, in a nutshell, proposes that emotions, as experienced by our living body, augment -- rather than impair -- decision making. Through evolution, the brain has acquired feelings and emotions to safeguard correct decision making, i.e., to prevent making errors.
This view is contrasted with the "traditional view," attributed loosely to Descartes and other Continental philosophers, that reason is at its best when emotions are kept out of the process. However, the book is not about a mistaken French philosopher. In fact, it suffers from its superficial treatment of Descartes.
The book is generally well-written, although there are inconsistencies in that
some simple terms (such as the brain's lobes) are explained and depicted in
illustrations, while not-simple terms (such as "subfornical organ")
are
not.
Dr. Spitzer, of Psychiatric University Hospital, Heidelberg, Germany, was Visiting Professor of Psychology at Harvard University during 1994.