Damasio with brain sections, cells, slides and scans
Antonio Damasio:
Antonio Damasio appears only cursorily as a character in my creative work, temporarily attached to Carmen de Terremonde as they dangle (beneath their tandem parachute canopy) from the church spire in Frank's imagination. His ideas about ‘brain’ and ‘consciousness’, however, have been integrated into the re-interpretation of my personal ‘brain’ symbology. Ideas and pictures and stories about what ‘my own’ post accident brain’ is, as opposed to ‘any other’ post accident brain (or brains in general), have been gathered up with Damasio’s imagery and melded into something new. This ‘understanding brain’ part of the reconstruction of my narrative whole is not the same thing as the project of ‘understanding brain’, (and consciousness) would be in a general sense. Damasio has been ‘written in’ to Ainslie’s Short Story to be Continued.
Antonio Damasio uses a theatrical metaphor to introduce his work on emotion and the part it plays in human consciousness: A performer steps out from the shadows of the wings into the light of the stage under the critical gaze of an expectant audience. Damasio introduces this precise moment of ‘stepping into the light’ as a metaphor for consciousness, the birth of the knowing mind, the sense of self becoming known in the world of the mental. He goes on to lay down the biological circumstances that permit this critical transition from innocence and ignorance to knowingness and selfness, describing an interaction between the organism (that within which consciousness occurs) and the object (that which the organism encounters) an interaction in which a mediating consciousness constructs knowledge about that interaction and the changes that the object brings about in the organism.
A simple example: I (the organism) become aware that the burr (the object) inside my trousers is causing me (the organism) discomfort (an unwanted change). My images of the interaction – the unrelentingly irritating quality of the burr, the various extraction scenarios I might employ with greater and lesser humiliating consequence in a public place – provide me with options for bringing about a change in that undesirable circumstance (a desirable change). The complexity, or otherwise, of the images I create will depend on the investment I have in the interaction and its outcome. “Images allow us to invent new actions and construct plans for future actions – to transform and combine images is the wellspring of creativity.” (Damasio, 2000, p24). If I had developed an unhappy attachment to the notion of public humiliation, the negative images emerging from my encounter with the burr might be sufficient to prompt me to leave it there, however uncomfortable that might be.
The value of consciousness, then, is that it provides us with the capacity to choose from a repertoire of images of past action and experience, and to create further images of possible options to achieve a range of outcomes. Consciousness confers the gift of imagining. Creativity gives us the means to make use of that gift.
This knowing selfness occurs in consciousness to some degree on a need to know basis. We have our own internal secret service. For example, it is not necessary for the organism (me) to ‘know’ from moment to moment what objects in my interior (such as heart valves, digestive secretions or temperature regulators) are up to. Nor is it necessary for me to bring into consciousness every aspect of what is going on in the world around me at any given time. I do need to know if my internal system is, for some reason, malfunctioning, or telling me some other important thing about myself – like my heart is pounding or my palms sweaty because I am in the presence of someone I deeply desire. Warnings of this nature are, in some manner, brought into consciousness. So too, are those aspects of the external world that are, hopefully, relevant to me in some way. This intelligence gatherer for consciousness, Damasio tells us, is emotion.
Reflex response takes care of much of what we encounter. So what is emotion for beyond that? If this flow of information is happening all the time outside of consciousness why do we need to concern ourselves with it in the broader scheme of things? If we begin by looking at this very pared down level of emotional functioning it becomes easier to understand what might be happening as more complex layers of imaged experience are added and more complex emotional responses to them felt. We can begin to see the ways in which emotion is indispensable to the processes of reasoning and decision making in each individual life – and beyond that to the sharing of experiences and ideas and the creation of structures that determine our collective quality of life.
Every encounter I have with my world, both inside and out, is gathered and filtered by my emotional ‘secret agents’ to decide which encounters require a deliberative response and what information needs to be brought into consciousness for further attention. This screening process, Damasio tells us, while being a fundamental requirement for our being in the world, has a cost – in that it makes knowledge of the nature and origin of the thing we call self much harder to apprehend. The very process that gives us our ‘sense’ of self, in doing its work, obscures itself from us. The origin of the messages that emotions bring to us may be similarly obscured from view (eg I may never know why my blood pressure temporarily peaks when I see a man in a white coat with a stethoscope). Emotions might be of vital interest to my well-being, however, I may or may not be aware of what stimulated them. Nor can emotions and their messages be controlled by will, although actions can and in most instances are controlled by will. (ibid p41-47) The existence of this nifty little perceptual filtering system in healthy brains, gave me some insight into why, for some months after my head injury, I couldn’t more than one person talking to me at a time, the children running about the house, the phone ringing or the sound of the radio. My ability to filter out information coming to me from the world at large was temporarily impaired. I found the plethora of simultaneous information disturbing and confusing – sights, sounds, movement coming from everywhere, everything in the foreground of consciousness at once, nothing receding into the background to allow focus and clarity. This, needless to say, ran my overtaxed, information gathering, emotions ragged. All I wanted was to close my eyes, block my ears and shut it all out.
If elucidating the mind is the last frontier of the life sciences, consciousness often seems like the last mystery of the elucidation of the mind. Some regard it as insoluble (Damasio, 2000, p. 4)
Damasio has brought back into the argument a crucial element left out by Descartes, Hume, Darwin, Freud and many previous contributors to the science of emotion – the notion of the organism as an unequivocally integrated system, an interrelated whole. He gives emotion back its body, as other recent consciousness studies of the Churchlands, Thomas Nagel and Daniel Dennett have also done. I find the idea of emotion as a sensible, no-nonsense gatherer of information gratifying and useful. Gratifying in that it helps to remove an unhelpful, misguided, and often gender based stigma which has shunted emotional function off to an airy-fairy, unreliable and insubstantial siding (where it is of benefit to no-one); and useful as a standpoint from which to consider the question of creativity, which has been shunted away to a similarly airy-fairy and insubstantial siding for anyone not accorded the status of genius.
What is of great interest to me at this point in Damasio’s discussion, is the question of emotion’s character in the relational realm, its participation in a responsive world – the emotional ripples, eddies and turbulence that occur when living beings encounter one another, an object, a memory, an ancestral thread, explaining as it does the reason why my unfiltered apprehension of the world around me was so confusing. Relationships change and reconfigure with each new encounter, as new emotional reactions are felt and given meaning – bodies in perpetual motion, creating ripples in the e-motional soup.
Biographical notes – Frank Erne
Frank Erne can be said to be as significant a mentor of this study as my three other collaborators. While he is a fiction, Frank’s character has guided me through this project from start to finish. His questions never fail to fascinate and challenge me and his unfailing generosity and warmth are both encouraging and humbling. I feel the thesis story would be incomplete without some words about his life. He emerged from an encounter on a Bondi Junction train.
Frank Erne was born on a particularly cold morning on the 29th of May. The year he was born is unclear, Frank can’t remember ever having known it. He is around 30 years old. Frank spends each and every birthday taking a ferryboat ride from Circular Quay to Watson’s Bay, sometimes with his friend Shirley, and on one occasion with his Aunt Beryl. He eats fish and chips on the retaining wall by the yacht club, then walks up to The Gap and back again, down through the village lanes. This birthday tradition was instituted (by Frank’s mother) when he was three years old. The first, and only, time he ever encountered his father. It has always been the happiest day of his year. Frank was a placid, cheerful child, spending his early years with his mother in a flat in the inner city Sydney suburb of Kings Cross (notorious then, as now, as the city’s premier red light district). Frank’s mother had a stimulating intellectual life, an appalling sense of judgment with relationships, and many interesting friends. An artist of some talent, she gave up her painting to focus on educating Frank about anything and everything that ignited his interest. He was home schooled. Frank made many friends in The Cross, including Serge, the pavement artist and a local private detective by the name of Carmen.
When Frank’s mother died his Aunty Beryl became his guardian and he moved into a boarding house nearby his old home. His intense grief for his mother subsided somewhat when Carmen took him on as her assistant and his days (and nights) became packed with problem solving. He eventually developed a close friendship with Shirley, another boarding house resident. He is dedicated to Shirley, Carmen and his work and continues to pursue his intellectual interests when and wherever the opportunity arises.
The following Intermezzo is intended as a peaceful interlude, made up of notes, selections of journal entries and other material emerging from my explorations in ‘creativity country’: a quiet ‘time out’ from theoretical concerns.
