Descartes' Error: Antonio Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis

Descartes’ Error is a 1994 book by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio which outlines the somatic marker hypothesis, a theory about how the mind and body not only interact, but are indissociable. Damasio argues that those feelings provide what he calls ‘somatic markers’ for the mind that aid decision making. They point us in the right (or wrong) direction.

The rationalist or Cartesian view – what Damasio calls the ‘high-reason’ view – suggests that our mind is like a computer. We’re running through all of this incomplete knowledge about the job – the commute, the career prospects, the people, the location, while weighing up the advantages and disadvantages as if its a ledger. But Damasio writes ‘you will lose track. Attention and working memory have a limited capacity.’

This is where somatic markers come in. He writes:

‘before you apply any kind of cost/benefit analysis to the premises, and before you reason toward the solution of the problem, something quite important happens: When the bad outcome connected with a given response option comes into mind, however fleetingly, you experience an unpleasant gut feeling. Because the feeling is about the body, I gave the phenomenon the technical term somatic state.’

He continues:

The somatic marker ‘forces attention on the negative outcome to which a given action may lead, and functions as an automated alarm signal which says: Beware the danger ahead if you choose the option which leads to this outcome. The signal may reject, immediately, the negative course of action and thus make you choose among other alternatives.’

Somatic markers – the collection of feelings we get from bodily and mental impulses – highlight certain options for us to deliberate while eliminating others. They’re a kind of screening process.

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Credits:

Damasio Photo: Fronteiras do Pensamento, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Some sources:

Georges Dicker, Descartes: An Analytical and Historical Introduction

Rene Descartes, Meditations

Anthony Damasio, Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

Antonio Damasio & Marco Verweij, The Somatic Marker Hypothesis and Political Life

The Cambridge Companion to Descartes and Cartesianism

The Oxford Companion to Descartes

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