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Friday, March 29, 2024

Self Comes To Mind

Here’s a very interesting interview with eminent neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. Antonio Damasio pioneered several important themes in studying the mind and consciousness, including the importance of emotion. – Ilene 

Self Comes To Mind

mindBy Jonah Lehrer, Wired Science | Wired.com

Excerpt: 

At first, the card selection process is entirely haphazard. There is no reason to favor any specific deck, and so most people sample from each pile, searching for the most lucrative cards. On average, people have to turn over about 50 cards before they began to draw solely from the profitable decks. Logic is slow.

But Damasio wasn’t interested in logic: he was interested in emotion and the body. When he devised this experiment in the early 90s, the gamblers played the card game while hooked up to a machine that measures the electrical conductance of their skin. In general, higher levels of conductance signal nervousness and anxiety. What the scientists found was that after drawing only ten cards, the hands of the experimental subjects got “nervous” whenever they reached for the negative decks. Although the subjects still had little inkling of which card piles were the most lucrative, their emotions had developed an accurate sense of fear. They knew which decks were dangerous. In other words, their feelings figured out the game first – the hand was leading the brain.

Interestingly, neurological patients unable to experience any emotion at all – they have a damaged orbitofrontal cortex – proved incapable of selecting the right cards. While most people make substantial amounts of money during the experiment, these patients often went bankrupt, and had to take out extra “loans” from the experimenter. Because they were unable to associate the bad decks with negative feelings – their hands never developed the symptoms of nervousness – they continued to draw equally from all four decks. (If you’re interested in this experiment, I highly recommend Damasio’s previous books, such as Descartes’ Error.)

Continue here: Self Comes To Mind | Wired Science | Wired.com.

Books by Antonio Damasio: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (new), Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human BrainThe Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain

 

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