91av

WE ARE still struggling with the question of how it is that our brains not only produce images of the sights, sounds and smells around us but also accompany them with private feelings and a sense of “being there”.

Antonio Damasio is a professor of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy at the University of Southern California, and he has a profound answer to this so-called hard problem of consciousness. In The Strange Order of Things, he argues that brains don’t produce consciousness on their own. Rather, brains and bodies work together: feelings, subjectivity and consciousness emerge from their interactions.

Damasio’s explanation of how consciousness might be constructed is a dramatic moment in a wonderful, deep and wide-ranging book. He has tackled the topic before in The Feeling of What Happens and other bestsellers, but never given such a lucid explanation in non-technical language, nor embedded it within the wider theme explained in this new book. That theme is simple, says Damasio: “Feelings have not been given the credit they deserve.”

“Feelings work because they ‘see’ the inner state and make it matter to the owner”

Damasio has spent a lifetime investigating “why and how we emote, feel, use feelings to construct our selves; how feelings assist or undermine our best intentions; why and how brains interact with the body”. This book is a summing-up of what he has learned, explaining why feelings not only help us crack the hard problem but also give us a way to connect human culture with life that existed “as early as 3.8 billion years ago”.

Damasio’s views have always been controversial because he insists that we can’t understand consciousness by only looking at how the brain interacts with the world outside ourselves; we have to include the world within us too. This is “commonly ignored to the peril of realistic conceptions of general physiology and cognition”, he writes.

The body is so important to consciousness because alongside what we perceive in the outside world, we map two kinds of internal world, says Damasio. The first is the old world of metabolism – of heart, lungs, guts, skin and blood vessels. What we sense from this ancient world we describe in terms of pain, pleasure, well-being and fatigue. These are the “core components of feelings”. He quotes Wordsworth with approval: “sensations sweet, felt in the blood and felt along the heart”.

Riding on this background flow are more powerful emotive responses, triggered by our reactions to things around us, by memories, by hunger, thirst or lust, and by emotions like joy, sadness, fear, anger and envy. These reactions, which bring about changes within the body, are largely powered by parts of the brain beneath the cortex, and are triggered non-consciously.

It is then that the second and more recently evolved vertebrate bodily world, that of the skeleton and muscles, can play its part. “Images” from this second world provide a “body phantom” for our sensory portals – our ears, nose, mouth and eyes – and maps of where we are looking as muscles direct our view. The subjective view emerges, says Damasio, when feelings that describe the inner state of life are placed in the perspective of the body as it catches itself in the act of creating images of the outside world.

Let’s reflect. Damasio has provided several ingredients of consciousness but has scarcely mentioned the cortex, where explanations usually begin. For him, focusing entirely in the cortex and visual system for the “neural correlates of consciousness” is “wrong on all counts”.

We certainly need the cortex. It helps bring together many different brain areas in the final step of the multimedia theatre experience of consciousness. Here Damasio concurs with other researchers that we need to explain how the cortex pulls off massive brain-wide integration, in what neurobiologist Stanislas Dehaene vividly describes as “global ignition”.

Damasio is a profound thinker, and there is more to his layered panorama describing the work of feelings in consciousness than this sketch implies. I particularly like the way it encourages you to look at your own experience: you might observe that “your conscious mind is not a monolith. It is composed. It has parts. The parts are well integrated, so much so that some hinge on others, but they are parts nonetheless.”

To search for the roots of feeling, Damasio repurposes the word homeostasis, moving from a definition of maintaining an organism’s balance to one of its “flourishing”, and to the projection of life into the future.

Looked at in this way, he finds a unity in life, everywhere driven by “the homeostatic imperative”. Homeostasis may proceed automatically in bacteria, but in creatures with nervous systems, its processes can be monitored: “feelings tell the mind, without any word being spoken, of the good or bad direction of the life process”. Feelings work because they “see” the inner state and make it matter to the owner. This metaphorical use of homeostasis allows Damasio to take an original look at culture, the human condition and science.

“It is the range of feelings that makes us what we are, with our triumphs, tragedies, suffering, joy”

We usually associate culture with creative intelligence, but instead Damasio asks us to see its purpose as “producing homeostatic corrections”. How can we imagine the birth of the arts, Damasio asks, and not picture “one individual working on the resolution of a problem posed by a feeling?”

I accept Damasio’s big thesis that the human condition encompasses two worlds: reason, and feeling. These “nature-given rules of life-regulation” reach back to the homeostatic world of the earliest creatures, “the strings of which are pulled by the invisible hands of pain and pleasure” – strings we didn’t make and can’t easily alter. I am less sure that this makes it any easier to pin down the human condition, other than exploring it as writers and artists have always done.

In his explorations of himself, Damasio reveals a humanist with a few tricks for managing his own feelings. He explains that, “for some of us, so many good moments of the past can become, in recollection, wonderful… even extraordinary moments… the transformation can be magic and entertaining”. The positive feeling accompanying his reconstruction of his past helps to create a great future. He accepts not everyone thinks this way, but I suspect it might be worth learning.

He is unimpressed by futurists who imagine we may one day engineer our pains away, or perfect ourselves. It is the full range of feelings that makes us what we are, with our triumphs and tragedies, suffering and joy. And he thinks it fine to accept life doesn’t deal you a perfect hand and you must make the best of it. “I know, I should have been taller,” he writes, adding that his acceptance of imperfection has been criticised as a kind of “Stockholm syndrome”, in which you come to love your captors.

Damasio has a love of life, and the real joy of reading The Strange Order of Things isn’t its bigger thesis but the insights that make you stop and think. He has considered this way of reading, too, explaining how the reference “I” of subjectivity can come and go, and that a flow of highly absorbing media can catch us up in another’s vision so we lose awareness of our thoughts and cede control of our time. “Turn to literature if you really want to be free,” says Damasio. His book is a wonderful space to practise that freedom.

Book details:

This article appeared in print under the headline “Feel your way to being human”