Interuieur

Body and Consciousness:A Conversation with Antonio Damasio

Grant Jewell RichBates College

35 Wood Street, apt. 8BLewiston, ME 04240optimalex@aol.com

AbstractThis is an interview with neurologist Antonio Damasio, MD, PhD, whose work

on consciousness has influenced scholars in a variety of fields, including anthropology.Damasio addresses a number of issues, including the neurobiology of altered states,the neurology of flow and other optimal, pleasurable states, and the potential toidentify biological markers that are common to the experience of altered states in avariety of cultures. Damasio also discusses the relationship between body and brain,and concludes by discussing the scope of the consciousness problem and contributionsto the solution that anthropologists might be well suited to make. Key words: body,consciousness, altered states, interview.

Rich: The study of altered states of consciousness has a long history amonganthropologists who have detailed such states among numerous groups across theglobe. Breathing exercises, ritual drumming, yoga, meditation, dancing, and fastingare some of the techniques used to achieve such states. From a neurologicalperspective, how might we account for such mental alterations via bodily practice?

Damasio: Well, as you can gather from the articles that I have published and fromThe Feeling of What Happens, I look at consciousness as a complex neurobiologicalprocess that is based on processes of homeostasis — that is, on the processes ofregulating the state of the organism. And, in that regard, you can see an immediatebridge to a number of the practices that anthropologists have been interested in. Afrequent result of those practices is, in fact, to alter in a very subtle way the state ofthe organism, whether this is achieved by, for instance, changing the rhythm ofrespiration, or by a dance, or by the process of meditation, which is aimed substantially

Anthropology of Consciousness 11 (3-4):54-61. Copyright €> 2000 American Anthropological Association54

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Aniomo Damasio,photo by Jonathan Van Alien

at an alteration of how one perceives one'sown body. All of those practices, in one wayor another, tend to connect with processes— neurobiological processes, that is — thatwe have studied and that we are proposing asimportant in the fundamental mechanismsunderlying consciousness.

Rich: Just to probe a little bit more deeply onthis, you mentioned respiration and dance.How might these physical "alterations" inparticular alter consciousness? Are thereparticular loci in the brain where these mightbe represented7

Damasio. For example, let's take the issue ofrespiration. What you are doing when youalter the pace and depth of respiration is notonly changing the way your musculoskeletalsystem operates, as you change the rhythm at which you move the ribcage, but youalso change the way in which a particular set of viscera, such as the lungs, the heart,and the upper respiratory system operate. And, you are also changing a number ofparameters in the internal milieu- the set of chemical states that define life in theorganisms interior. That is, by tinkering with the proportions of oxygen and CO2

available in the living tissues, you change the internal milieu. In a number ofchemical processes that are consequent upon those changes, you end up making asubstantial change in the body as a whole. Let me make this even more specific byreminding you that when I talk about organism or body—which are terms that arealmost synonymous for practical purpose—what I am referring to is not just ourskeleton and the muscles attached to its parts. I'm referring to the viscera—the heart,lungs, the gut, and all the smooth muscles in the walls of blood arteries—and also tothe internal chemistry, that at any given moment, are bathing all the cells, in all thetissues of the organism including, of course, numerous cells of our nervous system.Body or organism as a whole, is the collection of allof these living structures and mostof what 1 think is critical in the phenomena of emotion and consciousness is linkedto the changes that occur in the body and to the representations of those changes thatcan occur subsequently in particular sectors of the brain.

Rich Let's speak about one particular type of altered state ot consciousness. Thesocial psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at the University of Chicago, who is acontributor to this special issue, has written extensively on a state of optimalfunctioning he calls flow. The humanistic psychologist Abe Maslow used the termpeak experience to describe a similar state. Athletes, musicians, and others oftenreport such experiences in retrospect after excellent performances. Now accordingto Csikszentmihalyi the flow experience has nine main elements. There are cleargoals every step of the way, there is immediate feedback to ones actions, theres abalance between challenges and skills so that one is neither anxious nor bored,

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actions and awareness are merged, distractions are excluded from consciousness,there's no worry of failure, self consciousness disappears, the sense of time becomesdistorted, and the activity becomes self guiding. How might a neurologist explainsuch a peak or flow experience?

Damasio: I know about the concept of flow, and, in essence, I think, it is anemotional state. What you get when you are in a state of flow, is "the feeling of aparticular emotion," which happens to be a pleasurable emotion, and which isindicative of something quite optimal in terms of organism operations and which Ibelieve is conducive to a number of optimal brain conditions which in turn allow fora great ease of mental processing and which are ideal for creativity. Now, of course,flow is experienced as different, and it's all right to say that flow is an altered state ofconsciousness in very general terms. But one has to be careful with the term alteredhere because in the end every state is an altered state relative to the one before, andthere are good altered states and bad altered states. And of course, when you use theterm consciousness to designate such states, the term loses its specificity. Everythingthat is in our mind when we are conscious, becomes describable as consciousness. Inshort, flow is a wonderful state of emotion that has important repercussions on theway your cognitive apparatus operates. I've been very interested in such statesbecause I defend the point that the backdrop for our entire conscious mind processis constituted by cycles of emotion and feeling and that emotion and feeling cyclesare critical both for consciousness and for reasoning, decision-making, and creativityabilities.

Rich: I'm going to revisit that point again in a few moments. But let's talk more aboutthese positive mental states, maybe ideal religious states—religious ecstasy or deepmeditation. Could you describe what might be going on with neurotransmitters inthe brain or particular areas in the brain which might in some way be altered?

Damasio: We're only beginning to unravel the systems and the processes that areinvolved in such states. For instance, we know that certain neurotransmitters, togive you an example, serotonin and dopamine, are in all likelihood, very involvedin those states. There are certain structures of the brain stem, hypothalamus, and thesomatosensory cortices that no doubt have to be involved as well, and we even havean inkling of which parts of those systems are more involved in the positive andnegative emotions. But it is also very important to realize that although it'sinteresting to know the mechanics of it, to know which parts operate in whichdirection and with which intensity and which neurotransmitters are involved, themost important thing to consider here is the overall conception of the phenomenawe are talking about. When we talk about a pleasurable state, we are talking abouta particular image of the operation and the structure of your own body. I think thatthis is the critical point, a point that I have been making in a lot of my work, andthat often tends to be neglected perhaps because people are somewhat afraid of thenotion or have not really thought about what goes on in their minds when theyexperience such things as pain and pleasure. What I want to make very clear is thatto talk about pain and pleasure and states in between involves talking about the stateof your own organism, physically speaking, as represented in the brain.

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Rich: Interesting. Melzack has a gate control theory of pain. Might there be ananalogous type of mechanism for pleasurable states?

Damasio: Oh absolutely. It would be unthinkable that there wouldn't be. They'reprobably similar systems — not necessarily the mirror image of each other — butthere is little doubt there are such systems.

Rich: In psychology, there's been a focus on negative as opposed to positive functionuntil very recently. Perhaps the same goes for medical and neurological fields as well.Can you explain why there has been a relative lack of research on the positive states?

Damasio: Well, there are numerous possible reasons. From a practical point of view,you can imagine that people may have been more interested in the negative emotionsbecause it is largely the negative emotions that cause so-called mental and physicalpathologies. It is thanks to the negative emotions that you suffer and may end uphaving a variety of health conditions that prevent your normal life activities. Theother thing is that there are, numerically speaking, more negative emotions thanthere are positive. In fact, you could make the point that there is one kind of positiveemotion with several variations, but there are numerous kinds of negative emotionsthat are very different in terms of their structure and their operation. Think aboutdisgust, anger, fear, sadness, jealousy, shame, and so on. It doesn't make any differencewhether they are the primary emotions or the secondary, there are always more onthe negative side, probably reflecting their evolutionary role. After all, the emotionsare evolutionary devices and they were installed, so to speak, to allow an organismto deal with certain very specific threats and challenges from the environment. Thepositive emotions are a different thing. One can reasonably say that they're designedto make us deal with the good things in the environment and to lead us to endorsethose things and engage those things, such as sources of energy or sex or what haveyou. So overall, it is understandable that people would be drawn to the negativeemotions just out of sheer quantity and clinical import. Of course, the positive areequally or even more important for survival because one cannot have the totality ofadaptive behavior without having the positive emotions. So I think it's just a matterof time. We are very interested in studying the positive emotions right now, and Iknow that other colleagues are as well.

Rich: Anthropologists may quibble with his work, but the psychologist, Paul Ekman,has completed very influential work, proposing six or seven basic emotions, whichmay vary somewhat across cultures. I know that only one of them- happiness- is apositive emotion. Many anthropologists will quibble with this work and will focusmore on the individual differences between cultures and between people. It's ahugely complex issue, of course. But do you think that eventually we'll get to thepoint where we might be able to look at biological markers to identify similarities inthese emotions and states such as meditation and religious ecstasy cross-culturally?

Damasio: Oh yes, I think that it is very likely that we will be able to do so. Whetherthat would be interesting, I don't know. That would be up to the anthropologists, butI don't think there's much doubt that it will be possible to establish such markers. Ofcourse, it's very important to think about the cultural and social aspects of thephenomena as well. When we talk about emotions, we are, no doubt, dealing with

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biological phenomena, but these phenomena occur in organisms that are inserted inan environment with which they're interacting all the time from early developmentonward. So while it is acceptable to talk about emotions as biological phenomena,it is important to note that they are part of a system that includes not just an organismbut the physical and cultural environment in its surround.

Rich: What type of positive biological markers might we look for? Neurotransmitters?Markers in the cerebral spinal fluid? Using particular types of brain scans?

Damasio: Everything from very specific scans at the systems level, to all sorts ofchemical molecules that can be searched for in the blood stream, and fluids such assaliva.

Rich: Could you give one or two specific examples of positive indicators that mightbe biological markers that today, in the year 2000, we could actually look at?

Damasio: We are just in the process of publishing new results indicating that duringfeelings of happiness the pattern of engagement of a brain area called the cingulate,an area called the insula, and another one called S2, is entirely different from thepatterns we find in any other emotion- very, very different, for instance, from sadness.

Rich: That's fascinating. I did have some questions about Descartes' Error. In thatbook, you wrote that "contrary to traditional scientific opinion, feelings are just ascognitive as other precepts. They are the result of a most curious physiologicalarrangement that has turned the brain into the body's captive audience."

Damasio: I am so glad you picked up on that sentence. I like it so much I can't getaway from its meaning. (All laugh.)

Rich: This "physiological arrangement that has turned the brain into the body'scaptive audience." Can you expand upon that idea?

Damasio: In The Feeling of What Happens, I use an example that gets precisely at whatI mean by that idea. If you are now looking at a page, you will see, of course, theletters, and the words, that you're reading as you go along. Now, look up from thepage and look at what's in front of you, for instance, at a window. And, what hashappened, right at that moment, is that the visual cortex in your brain instead ofconstructing images for the book's page, now is constructing images of the windowin front of you. Now turn around 180 degrees and look at what's behind you; thereis something else and your visual cortex is now creating an image of whatever it isbehind you. Then return to the book and look at the page. Well, in all of these threeconditions, looking at the book, looking in front of you, and looking behind you, thevisual cortex has been free to roam around the world and it simply constructs whatit is commanded to construct by your position in space and by where your eyes andretinas are turned to. Whereas, your brain's somatosensory cortices, those that lookat the state of your body, are there like prisoners, obliged to continue representingyour body throughout all of these three episodes, in the very same way, with the samesubject. So, that's what I mean by a captive audience. Whether they want it or not,the somatosensory cortices keep "looking at your body" continuously every second,whereas the other cortices look at whatever you tell them to look at, depending on

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your position in space or the position of your head and eyes. So there's this enormousdifference between the infinite sameness of the input that the somatosensory corticesget and the diversity of inputs that the cortices that look out into the world can get.Of course, this is critical because a lot of what I construct in my theory ofconsciousness in The Feeling of What Happens is based on this idea. And if anyonedoesn't understand this idea, the theory sounds very strange. If one understands thisidea, then one realizes that there is a core of continuity and sameness in our mindwhich is, in fact, being provided quite naturally by the body. One doesn't need toresort to esoteric explanations, one doesn't need to pluck explanations from the sky,one plucks them from within. It is our body that is providing the continuity on thebasis of which we can eventually build a notion of self.

Rich: Now you go on to say in that section, "Our most refined thoughts and bestactions, our greatest joys and deepest sorrows use the body as a yardstick. The mindhas to first be about the body or it could not have been. The organism reacts withthe environment as an ensemble. The interaction is neither of the body alone northe brain alone." So you argue that body precedence may shed light on our abilityto be conscious of the world around us. And if you just expanded upon that a littlemore, what might you add?

Damasio: Everything that is happening — the actions we perform on objects, thepictures we take of objects whether they be visual or sound pictures — are alwaystaken in the measure of our own body, the actions are taken in the measure of our ownbody. We have no way of interacting with the world without the components thatform the body and that are within the boundary of the body. And it is the image ofall those components that provides the scaffolding for everything else that you hangon it, that you literally decorate it with.

Rich: I did want to ask you about the philosopher, Daniel Dennett, who has becomefamous in part by writing the boldly titled Consciousness Explained. Has neurologyreally explained consciousness? Will it ever explain it? What or where might thelimits of biological reduction be?

Damasio: I think neurology and biology in general will probably explain most ofwhat needs to be explained about consciousness. I think Dan Dennett, who is aphilosopher whom I very much admire, was being a little bit tongue in cheek whenhe titled his book, Consciousness Explained. I don't think he really meant it that way.But I think we will explain a lot and are on the way to explaining a lot. I doubt wewill ever explain all. We are trying to explain the mind, but we are using the mindto explain the mind. This is the problem that may limit our ability to look into theproblem completely. However, I think that it is obvious from what has been goingon—first in psychology and now in the combination of psychology and neurosciencethat you find in cognitive neuroscience — that we are making enormous progress inthe understanding of all sorts of phenomena that nobody ever thought we had aprayer of understanding, for example, memory or language or the operation of themotor system or emotion. Why should it be different for consciousness? I don't thinkthat it should, and I think that for all of these phenomena, there will be ways in whichwe will get to understand most of the problem. I make the point in The FeelingofWhat

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Happens, that there's one part of the problem, the one that I call the "movie-in-the-brain," that is probably the toughest one to crack. I don't think that the other partof the problem, which pertains to the self is as tough, although that normally is takenas the toughest. The Feeling of What Happens is dedicated to the idea that we arebeginning to understand the fundamental basis for the self, at systems level, today.But how you come to have a neural pattern in the brain, become what we call amental image, is something that we are far from understanding. From there, however,I would be very surprised if we would not be able to make huge inroads on thatproblem in the next few decades. When and where and how, I don't know, but I thinkthat a good part of that problem is going to be explainable.

Rich: How might anthropology, with its field methods and interview types ofmethodology, contribute to a study of consciousness?

Damasio: You can begin by mentioning one contribution: the study of the ways inwhich different cultures can manipulate the mind. That's a very importantcontribution. The other is to interrelate the results of those studies with the studyof the kinds of cultural and social organization in which these phenomena arestudied. I think that this will be a way of linking in a very effective manner aspectsof social and cultural operations to aspects of biology. I think that would be extremelyimportant and a means to make the field of mind studies all the more rich.Neurobiology alone should not be trying to explain all or should not be expected toexplain all. The phenomena of the mind are very complex, and the practice ofseveral adjoining sciences, pulled together, is needed in order to get to the enormouscomplexity.

Rich: If you were given the opportunity to create your ideal dream team of scholarsto study consciousness, what types of fields would be represented?

Damasio: General biology, specific aspects of neurobiology, cognitive science,philosophy of mind, anthropology, sociology. I think that those would probably bethe fundamental fields. But quite frankly, the problem is so big that anyone tryingto understand consciousness needs all the help they can get. So let them all come.

Rich: A final question: what's your next move?

Damasio: Ah-hah! That's the question not to be answered ever. One generallymakes a fool of oneself by answering questions like that. What I can tell you is thatwe continue to look at brain systems linked with memory and language, but we arelooking at them in the context of emotion, the context of consciousness, and thecontext of decision-making and creativity. And we look at these systems from manyperspectives.

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NotesAcknowledgement: Thanks to Jerri Holmes for her aid in transcription.

ReferencesCsikszentmihalyi, Mihaly

1990 Flow. New York: HarperCollins.Damasio, Antonio

1995 Descartes'Error. New York: Putnam.1999 The Feeling of What Happens. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company.

Dennett, Daniel1992 Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown.

Ekman, Paul, and W.V. Friesen1975 Unmasking the Face. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Melzack, R., and PD Wall1965 Pain Mechanisms: a new theory. Science 150:971-979.