Antonio Damasio - Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain

A H ARVEST B OOK
H ARCOURT , I NC .
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Copyright 2003 by Antonio Damasio

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Damasio, Antonio R.
Looking for Spinoza: joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain/
Antonio Damasio.1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-15-100557-5 ISBN 0-15-602871-9 (pbk.)
1. Emotions. 2. Neuropsychology. 3. Spinoza, Benedictus de, 16321677.
I. Title.
QP401.D203 2003
152.4d21 2002011347

All figures, diagrams, and drawings are by Hanna Damasio except for the portrait on page 263. Her drawings in Chapters 1, 5, and 6 depict Spinoza's house on 72-74 Paviljoensgracht (page 9), a statue of Spinoza (page 16), the back of the New Church and Spinoza's tomb in The Hague (page 19), the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam (page 185), the house where Spinoza lived in Rijnsburg (page 223), a bust of Spinoza (page 225), and the old synagogue in Amsterdam (inspired by a 17th century engraving by Jan Veenhuysen). The portrait on page 263 is by Jean Charles Franois and was published by A. Savrien, Histoire des Philosophes Modernes, Paris, 1761.

Text set in Scala
Designed by Linda Lockowitz

Printed in the United States of America

First Harvest edition 2003
K J I H G F E D C B A

To Hanna

C HAPTER 1 Enter Feelings

Enter Feelings 3

The Hague 8

Looking for Spinoza 15

Beware 17

In the Paviljoensgracht 23

C HAPTER 2 of Appetites and Emotions

Trust Shakespeare 27

Emotions Precede Feelings 29

A Nesting Principle 37

More on the Emotion-Related Reactions: From Simple Homeostatic Regulation to Emotions-Proper 38

The Emotions of Simple Organisms 40

The Emotions-Proper 43

A Hypothesis in the Form of a Definition 53

The Brain Machinery of Emotion 54

Triggering and Executing Emotions 57

Out of the Blue 65

The Brain Stem Switch 73

Out-of-the-Blue Laughter 74

Laughter and Some More Crying 77

From the Active Body to the Mind 79

C HAPTER 3 Feelings

What Feelings Are 83

Is There More to Feelings than the Perception of Body State? 89

Feelings Are Interactive Perceptions 91

Mixing Memory with Desire: An Aside 93

Feelings in the Brain: New Evidence 96

A Comment on Related Evidence 101

Some More Corroborating Evidence 104

The Substrate of Feelings 105

Who Can Have Feelings? 109

Body States versus Body Maps 111

Actual Body States and Simulated Body States112

Natural Analgesia 113

Empathy 115

Hallucinating the Body 118

The Chemicals of Feeling 119

Varieties of Drug-Induced Felicity 121

Enter the Naysayers 124

More Naysayers 126

C HAPTER 4 Ever Since Feelings

Of Joy and Sorrow 137

Feelings and Social Behavior 140

Inside a Decision-Making Mechanism 144

What the Mechanism Accomplishes 147

The Breakdown of a Normal Mechanism 150

Damage to Prefrontal Cortex in the Very Young152

What If the World? 155

Neurobiology and Ethical Behaviors 159

Homeostasis and the Governance of Social Life166

The Foundation of Virtue 170

What Are Feelings For? 175

C HAPTER 5 Body, Brain, and Mind

Body and Mind 183

The Hague, December 2,1999 184

The Invisible Body 187

Losing the Body and Losing the Mind 191

The Assembly of Body Images 195

A Qualification 198

The Construction of Reality 198

Seeing Things 200

About the Origins of the Mind 204

Body, Mind, and Spinoza 209

Closing with Dr. Tulp 217

C HAPTER 6 A Visit to Spinoza

Rijnsburg, July 6, 2000 223

The Age 224

The Hague, 1670 227

Amsterdam, 1632 230

Ideas and Events 236

The Uriel da Costa Affair 240

Jewish Persecution and the Marrano Tradition245

Excommunication 250

The Legacy 254

Beyond the Enlightenment 258

The Hague, 1677 261

The Library 262

Spinoza in My Mind 263

C HAPTER 7 Who's There?

The Contented Life 267

Spinoza's Solution 273

The Effectiveness of a Solution 277

Spinozism 279

Happy Endings? 283

Appendices 291

Notes 299

Glossary 333

Acknowledgments 337

Index 339

Feelings of pain or pleasure or some quality in between are the bedrock of our minds. We often fail to notice this simple reality because the mental images of the objects and events that surround us, along with the images of the words and sentences that describe them, use up so much of our overburdened attention. But there they are, feelings of myriad emotions and related states, the continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming of the most universal of melodies that only dies down when we go to sleep, a humming that turns into all-out singing when we are occupied by joy, or a mournful requiem when sorrow takes over.

Given the ubiquity of feelings, one would have thought that their science would have been elucidated long agowhat feelings are, how they work, what they meanbut that is hardly the case. Of all the mental phenomena we can describe, feelings and their essential ingredientspain and pleasureare the least understood in biological and specifically neurobiological terms. This is all the more puzzling considering that advanced societies cultivate feelings shamelessly and dedicate so many resources and efforts to manipulating those feelings with alcohol, drugs of abuse, medical drugs, food, real sex, virtual sex, all manner of feel-good consumption, and all manner of feel-good social and religious practices. We doctor our feelings with pills, drinks, health spas, workouts, and spiritual exercises, but neither the public nor science have yet come to grips with what feelings are, biologically speaking.

I am not really surprised at this state of affairs, considering what I grew up believing about feelings. Most of it simply was not true. For example, I thought that feelings were impossible to define with specificity, unlike objects you could see, hear, or touch. Unlike those concrete entities, feelings were intangible. When I started musing about how the brain managed to create the mind, I accepted the established advice that feelings were out of the scientific picture. One could study how the brain makes us move. One could study sensory processes, visual and otherwise, and understand how thoughts are put together. One could study how the brain learns and memorizes thoughts. One could even study the emotional reactions with which we respond to varied objects and events. But feelingswhich can be distinguished from emotions, as we shall see in the next chapterremained elusive. Feelings were to stay forever mysterious. They were private and inaccessible. It was not possible to explain how feelings happened or where they happened. One simply could not get "behind" feelings.