Soul-searching science

If in the midst of an intense fight with your beloved, you find yourself crying, then be aware that you owe your feelings to a reaction triggered within the medial and ventral prefrontal region of the brain. If with this knowledge you laugh in relief, the reaction comes from the medial and dorsal prefrontal region. Which is one way of reading the hard-nosed implications of “Looking for Spinoza,” Antonio Damasio’s remarkable new book on the physical foundations of the emotional.

Damasio’s thesis is both philosophical and scientific. The emotions have physical location, indeed they are physical -- a part of the material construction of the brain. But that is not all: The physical structures of the brain can be transformed by the emotions. In a more classical age when bodies and souls were deemed separate and unequal by God, such a notion would have been attacked as atheism. Now it is simply unnerving.

Damasio’s project in this book continues work and philosophical positions he set forth in “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain” (1994) and “The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness” (1999). Almost like a crusader, Damasio, who is head of the department of neurology at the University of Iowa Medical Center and an affiliate of the Salk Institute in San Diego, attacks the Western propensity to separate emotion, feelings or affect -- our internal mental states and their visual manifestations -- from what we do or how we act. The separation has a philosophical pedigree that goes back to Descartes.

But taking on the father of modern philosophy requires more than neuroscience; for this, Damasio turns to philosophy and finds his ally in Spinoza, who followed Descartes first as a pupil and then as a radical rethinker of his decreed separation of thought from body. In our own time, philosophers have called for some kind of reassessment of the role of emotions or consciousness, but until lately the project had been left to them, not to science. Damasio’s once behaviorally oriented scientific work turned toward emotions only when he realized that patients with frontal lobe damage had not only behavior problems, they also could not feel. They registered no emotion in the face of tragedies, their own or others. Thus began a radical reorientation within neuroscience that entailed, as Spinoza would have put it, seeing that the mind exists for the body, or put perhaps too simply, we do not laugh because we feel happy, we feel happy because we laugh.

Damasio understands that contemporary neuroscientific work has conflated spirit into matter, soul into body (as Spinoza’s contemporaries would have put it), or as we might say now, places emotions in the cerebral cortices, the amygdala, the hypothalamus and the viscera. More accurately, however, Damasio argues that emotions formed as the result of evolutionary processes, work by blind mechanistic necessity and manage the body. As Damasio writes, “the result is feelings.” We feel because changes have occurred in the molecular structure of the brain. It is that simple, yet research on such a structure is overwhelmingly complex. It also has serious implications that go to the heart of our philosophical and moral assumptions.

Have the lover’s feelings been dismissed -- reduced to insignificance by the ever-expanding power of neuroscience -- or have we found a key for understanding depression or the disorders left by strokes and seizures? Both ethical implications are present. The obvious compassion that informs Damasio’s science may reassure the lover, but other unsettling implications still remain. All physical gestures -- and that includes the impact made by talk and discussion -- can shape the emotional life. That knowledge should validate psychotherapy. But the danger remains -- and indeed, some argue that this day is upon us -- that armed with a shallow reading of neuroscience, the HMOs and insurance companies could turn psychotherapy into 20-minute sessions for adjusting the drug dosage or for keeping the mentally ill passive or institutionalized.

When Damasio describes the physiology of laughing and crying, he invokes the philosophy of Spinoza, who, when considering the full implications of Descartes’ thought, moved away from his dualism and defined the world as matter in motion, with impulse and necessity at the root of human drives. Then and now, that philosophical position may be described as materialism or pantheism. The differences between materialism and pantheism are largely semantic: Materialists argue that matter is driven by blind forces, and pantheists argue that matter is driven by some embedded life spirit. During the 17th century, both positions were heresy pure and simple, for both reduced the soul to matter and the soul could be said to exist insofar as its imagined state evoked certain bodily feelings. For the devout, the same disturbing conclusion could be applied to God, who could be similarly ascribed existence insofar as his imagined being evoked a state of human feeling.

Prior to Spinoza and his followers -- around 1650 -- there was not a place in the Western world where such shocking thoughts were possible. Attempting to soften the image of materialism, the Irish freethinker, John Toland, gave the name pantheism to it in 1705. For the pantheist, Nature is God, and as a result, matter possesses life or force. The name rightly stuck and, for some, obscured the reality that a separate spiritual realm once reserved for the soul and for God had been obliterated by philosophy.

Historically, pantheism and materialism initiated a new era, what historians (since the 1980s) have called the Radical Enlightenment. Around 1700 being openly Spinozist could mean jail time, and it took two centuries of ferocious debate to resolve the issue. By 1900 and after the enormous impact of Darwin, materialism won out as an acceptable philosophical foundation for doing science. Science had sequestered itself from theological disputes and then gradually, haltingly, turned its gaze on the human mind itself. We created maps of the brain that occasionally could be shown to correspond with a physiological experience in a brain. The correspondences are now coming faster and with greater precision.

Thanks to the achievements of the new neuroscience, pantheism, with its emphasis upon life or consciousness within matter, has suddenly been made to seem all the more reasonable. A philosophical position once buried under the scorn of the devout has been reconstructed. Neuroscience is beginning to unlock areas of brain matter and their interconnections previously unknown. Consequently we understand feelings as altered modes of matter and see that all feelings exist in tension with the physical world, as it is experienced in the mind.

“Looking for Spinoza” accessibly lays out many of these discoveries while relating them to the beliefs of a once scorned 17th century thinker. We learn that the brain possesses body-sensing regions that enable it to construct “maps of the ongoing body state.” These regions are critically important, Damasio argues. Without them feelings would be impossible. Unlike what was previously believed, feelings are not instantaneous. They require anywhere from two to 20 seconds to occur, about as long as it takes the brain to register changes in body temperature, glucose levels or genital stimulation. Put another way, William James was right when he argued that feelings are what happen when the brain senses the body being changed by emotion. Feelings or affect become the end product of a deeply physical process that unfolds in the mind.

Damasio has the rare talent of rendering science intelligible while also being gifted in philosophy, literature and wit. He asks us to go against our intuition, to separate feelings from emotion and to see the latter as hard-wired and primal, a result of the evolutionary process. He then takes us through experiments that associate emotional states with the neural circuitry of certain regions of the brain. He explains why under certain circumstances the brain sends “false” signals, known as endorphins, and these shield the body from complete knowledge of the damage or danger that has been visited upon it.

As Spinoza’s more philosophically astute followers knew as early as 1700, standing in the world as a pantheist requires the embrace of paradox. Keeping true to evolutionary theory derived from Darwin, Damasio tells us that random selection and survival determined what got kept or discarded in the millenniums involved in human evolution. Yet in another moment, he assigns meaning and design, telling us that “nature provides us with the same analgesic shot” -- endorphins -- “that the compassionate physician administers to the patient suffering pain.” Vividly and unwittingly he illustrates what the first materialists stumbled upon when they eliminated God: Nature would have to stand in his place, evoked to explain the order and beneficence we see around us. Damasio embraces the paradox that random evolutionary processes govern nature and it still possesses attributes once assigned to God.

In Damasio’s post-Darwinian position, all is random mutation working to enhance the chances of some and not others. Damasio employs the analogy of machines and machinery in describing the circuitry of the brain but then confronts the behavioralist who would reduce human processes to the on-board computers of a Boeing 777. Like Diderot and other enlightened materialists before him, Damasio recoils from the analogy and turns to the vitalism found in the pantheist tradition, “every elementary part of our organism, every cell in the body, is not just animated but living.” Life is “a strange state” and no machine offers an equivalent to the living cell; even nerve sensors are living cells that “have a say” on the matter signaled to the brain. Once again, as in the 18th century, the escape from the cold, mechanistic implications of materialism lies in pantheism, in the realization that matter can be alive.

One of Damasio’s goals is to understand cold and uncaring behavior when it suddenly appears among patients who had previously been compassionate. Damage to a sector of the frontal lobe causes patients to exhibit asocial behavior, and by studying these behaviors, we learn how profoundly basic the integrity of emotion and feeling are for normal human social behavior. Damasio speculates that evolution itself would have failed humanity if it had started out with “a population deprived of the ability to respond toward others with sympathy, attachment, embarrassment, and other social emotions.”

Neuroscience at the moment may be interpreted as the pharmacologist’s best friend in the treatment of mental ailments, but it is also providing incontrovertible proof for the necessary linkage of social virtues and emotions. Conceiving of the emotions in pantheistic ways cannot explain how law, religious beliefs and ethical behaviors emerged, but we now know that without the beneficent hard-wiring of emotions, life would have been as Spinoza’s great contemporary Hobbes feared: solitary, nasty, brutish and especially short. Anyone with an interest in the origins of human nature, society, government or ethics needs to read this book and ponder its implications.

In homage to the philosopher who allowed matter to feel and think, Damasio begins and ends his account with a pilgrimage to Amsterdam and to Spinoza’s house and haunts. He asks: How does one become Spinoza? And to answer his question, Damasio tries his hand at Dutch history in the age of Rembrandt, almost Spinoza’s exact contemporary. He takes up fairly well-accepted generalizations about the Dutch as prosperous, relatively tolerant, anti-Catholic and, above all, preoccupied with trade and commerce, and then argues that the goal of the homeostasis endeavor means every cell of our bodies searches for “what we as thinking and affluent creatures identify as well-ness and well-being.” It cannot be accidental that first Spinoza and then Damasio write in the richest societies then known in the world.

Spinoza died amid a few close friends, an outcast from his synagogue, merely a heretical Jew in the eyes of pious Christians. The time of his philosophical insights may only now have arrived. Thanks to him, Antonio Damasio or other neuroscientists of his school may wind up as Nobel laureates.