Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

Receiving a comprehensive set of signals about the body state in the appropriate brain regions is the necessary beginning but is not sufficient for feelings to be felt. As I suggested in the discussion on images, a further condition for the experience is a correlation of the ongoing representation of the body with the neural representations constituting the self. A feeling about a particular object is based on the subjectivity of the perception of the object, the perception of the body state it engenders, and the perception of modified style and efficiency of the thought process as all of the above happens. Fooling the Brain What evidence is there supporting the claim that body states cause feelings? Some evidence comes from neuropsychological studies correlating loss of feeling with damage to the brain regions necessary to represent body states (see chapter 5 ), but studies conducted in normal individuals are also telling in this respect as well, specifically those by Paul Ekman. 14 When he gave normal experimental subjects instructions on how to move their facial muscles, in effect “composing” a specific emotional expression on the subjects’ faces without their knowing his purpose, the result was that the subjects experienced a feeling appropriate to the expression. For instance, a roughly and incompletely composed happy facial expression led to the subjects’ experiencing “happiness,” an angry facial expression to their experiencing “anger,” and so on. This is impressive if we consider that the subjects could perceive only sketchy, fragmentary facial postures, and that since they were neither perceiving nor evaluating any real situation that might trigger an emotion, their bodies were not exhibiting, at the outset, the visceral profile that accompanies a certain emotion. Ekman’s experiment suggests either that a fragment of the body pattern characteristic of an emotional state is enough to produce a feeling of the same signal, or that the fragment subsequently triggers the rest of the body state and that leads to the feeling. Curiously, not all parts of the brain are fooled, as it were, by a set of movements that is not produced through the usual means. New evidence from electrophysiological recordings shows that make-believe smiles generate different patterns of brain waves from those generated by real smiles. 15 At first glance the electrophysiological finding may seem to contradict that of the previously cited experiment, but it does not: although they reported the feeling appropriate to the fragment of facial expression, the subjects were well aware that they were not happy or angry at any particular thing.

Receiving a comprehensive set of signals about the body state in the appropriate brain regions is the necessary beginning but is not sufficient for feelings to be felt.