Talk to Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Antonio Damasio is a neurologist at USC whose work challenges the centuries-old idea that reason and emotion are separate faculties, with reason the reliable guide and emotion the unreliable interference. Descartes' Error, published in 1994, argues that this picture is wrong — that emotion is not an obstacle to good decision-making but a necessary ingredient of it, and that damage to the neural systems that process emotion reliably produces poor decision-making even when intelligence and logical capacity are intact.
The book's central case is Phineas Gage, the nineteenth-century railroad worker whose personality changed dramatically after a tamping iron destroyed his orbitofrontal cortex in a dynamite accident. Gage survived but was, as his doctors noted, "no longer Gage" — his capacity for decision-making and social behavior was destroyed even though his intelligence and memory remained intact. Damasio uses Gage alongside contemporary patients with similar orbitofrontal damage to argue that this region is critical for connecting emotional knowledge to deliberative reasoning.
What it gets right
- 1.
Emotion is not an obstacle to reason but a requirement for it. Patients with damage to emotional processing regions make disastrously poor decisions despite intact intelligence and logical capacity.
- 2.
Phineas Gage and patients with orbitofrontal damage demonstrate that the capacity to connect emotional knowledge to deliberative reasoning is a distinct and damageable neural function.
- 3.
The somatic marker hypothesis: bodily states — subtle physical responses tagged to options and outcomes — guide decision-making before and alongside conscious deliberation.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Antonio Damasio is University Professor, David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Philosophy, and Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. He is also an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. His research focuses on the neuroscience of emotion, consciousness, and decision-making. Beyond Descartes' Error, his books include The Feeling of What Happens, Looking for Spinoza, Self Comes to Mind, and The Strange Order of Things. He has received numerous international awards for his contributions to neuroscience and philosophy.
