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Antonio Damasio - The strange order of things The neuroscientist explains why feelings evolved Jan 24 2019 By Kevin Berger (Adapted by VB) http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/antonio-damasio-tells-us-why-pain-is-necessary

In his new book, The Strange Order of Things, Damasio, a professor of neuroscience and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California tells us that mind and brain influence the body just as much as the body can influence the brain and the mind. They are two aspects of the very same person.

The concept of “homeostasis” There are certain action programmes that are permanently installed in our organs and in our brains so that we can survive, flourish, reproduce and eventually, die. During the action program of fear, for example, a collection of things happen in the body that change you and make you behave in a certain way whether you want to or not. This is the world of life regulation—homeostasis. When people hear the word homeostasis, they often think of balance or equilibrium. We certainly need to maintain positive energy balances, something that goes beyond what we need right now, because that’s what ensures the future. Homeostasis is not just about sustaining life at the moment, but about having a guarantee that it will continue into the future. Without those positive energy balances, we court death. If you are at the edge of your energy reserves and you’re sick with the flu, you can easily tip over and die. That’s one of the reasons why there’s fat accumulation in our bodies. We need to maintain the possibility of meeting the extra needs that come from stress, in the broad sense of the term.

Why would feelings have evolved?

Feelings triumphed in evolution because they were so helpful to the organisms that first had them. Our nervous system serves the organism and not the other way around. Our brains do not control the entire operation. Brains adjust the controls. They are the servants of the living organism. Brains triumphed because they provided something useful: coordination. Once organisms got to the point of being so complex that they had an endocrine system, immune system, circulation, and central metabolism, they needed a device to coordinate all those processes. In doing that, over millions of years, we have developed nervous systems that do other things, such as

coordinating the internal world in relation to the outside world.

This is what the cerebral cortex, does. It gives us the possibilities of perceiving, memorising, reasoning and manipulating input and expressing in words. Deeper forms of biological regulation operate automatically and beyond our conscious control, but emotions allow us to make choices about how we'll express them and what we'll do in response.

“The scientist’s voice needs not be the mere record of life as it is. Deeper knowledge of brain and mind will help achieve happiness.”

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You need a mechanism in the brain that allows you to be the ‘watcher’. You have a layer of consciousness that is made by your perception of the outside world; and another layer that is made of appreciating the feelings that are being generated inside you. If we view these behaviours along a spectrum, from biological drives to primary emotions to secondary emotions to reasoning, we can see a decrease in automatic processing and an increase in conscious choice.

How do emotions such as anger or sadness serve homeostasis?

At individual levels, both anger and sadness are protective. Anger lets your adversary know that you mean business and that there may be costs to attacking you. Sadness is a prelude to mental hibernation. It lets you retreat and lick your wounds. It lets you plan a strategy of response to the cause of the wounds. The importance of feeling is that it makes you critically aware of what you are doing in moral terms. Feelings are a call to action.

When I was an adolescent, I often thought that I might become a philosopher or perhaps a playwright or filmmaker. That’s because I so admired what philosophers and storytellers had found about the human mind. Today when people ask me, “Who’s your most admired cognitive scientist?” I say Shakespeare. He knew it all and knew it with enormous precision. He didn’t have the nice fMRI scanner and electrophysiology techniques we have in our Institute. But he knew human beings. Watch a good performance of Hamlet, King Lear, or Othello. All of our psychology is there, richly analysed, ready for us to experience and appreciate.

Othello and Desdemona