The Feeling of What Happens

"Damasio’s subtitle – Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness – says it all. In our bodies and our emotions, we register the feeling of what happens. What this means is that if we split our minds from our bodies and our thoughts from our emotions, we lose touch with what is going on around us. Damasio’s research provides a neurological basis for understanding how we register our experience. It explains the resistance I observed to making these splits, and also shows how we can come to lose what we know in our bodies and our emotions. How we can lose touch with our experience and tell false stories about ourselves. The Feeling of What Happens highlights what psychologists call “dissociation” or splits in consciousness. Under normal conditions, our bodies and emotions pick up the music or the feeling of what happens, which then plays in our minds and thoughts. When we divorce our minds from our bodies or our thoughts from our emotions, we find ourselves at sea, unable to navigate the human emotional world. Damasio distinguishes between core consciousness or a core sense of self, grounded in the body and in emotions, and “the autobiographical self”, meaning the self that is wedded to a story about itself. What I saw is how splits in consciousness can undermine our capacity to resist false authority by silencing the voice of the core self, and how gender norms that align reason with masculinity and emotion with femininity encourage and enforce these splits. Yes. Sexism bifurcates human qualities into masculine and feminine. It imposes a gender binary where being a man means not being like a woman and vice-versa. Sexism is often another name for patriarchy, meaning a hierarchy or a rule of priests where the hieros , the priest, is a pater, a father. It designates an order of living that elevates some men over others, separating the men from the boys, and all men over women. It creates a gender hierarchy where human qualities gendered “masculine” are elevated over those gendered “feminine”. As such, it is an order of domination. But in dividing human qualities into masculine and feminine, sexism separates everyone from parts of themselves, creating rifts or splits in the psyche. This fragmentation of the psyche links patriarchy with trauma and explains its deleterious effects on everyone. Boys in becoming men or men wanting to be seen as “real men” will separate their thoughts from their emotions, which are regarded as weak or feminine. As in “boys don’t cry”. And girls will be torn between wanting to be seen as “good girls” or “good women”, meaning not masculine or self-assertive, and wanting to align themselves with the so-called masculine qualities that are privileged and socially valued. In sexist families or religions or societies or cultures, both men and women are pressured to render themselves half-human."

"What Damasio does that I find so outstanding is that he goes to the trouble of coming up with a useful definition of what is consciousness. Something that people before him used to be very elusive about, because everybody knows, everybody has consciousness, so we all know what we’re talking about, so why bother? I think that Damasio has it right on that the important first step in science is to define what exactly is the question at hand. If you want to talk about consciousness, you have to first define what consciousness is. Damasio actually offers definitions to what he proposes is a nested series of levels of consciousness. He begins with what I think he calls proto-consciousness, which is the most basic representation of your own body, going through self-consciousness, which he refers to as the ability to represent your brain activity as it represents the body. As your brain maps not only the body, but also its own process of mapping the body, he proposes that you gain self-consciousness or self-awareness, which is the basis of what we call insight. Eventually he gets to autobiographical memory, which is essentially your self-awareness over time, which allows you to keep a sense of where you’ve been, what you’ve felt like and where you expect to find yourself over time, and then on eventually to moral consciousness or social consciousness, which is where you fit in the bigger system of other people’s consciousness as well. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The really cool thing is that he not only proposed all these different levels of consciousness and types of consciousness, but he also reviewed the anatomical evidence that assigns each of these different levels to a nested system of structures in the brain. And so what he had in the end was something that actually made sense and was not only supported by evidence but offered testable hypotheses about the different types of consciousness – what parts of the brain are required or necessary or give rise to the different levels of consciousness; how things should break down when you have problems or disruptions in the different levels of the system. I think his book was really ground breaking and a real turning point for neuroscience. Yes, absolutely. I think it helps organise ideas about how we compare to other species because essentially what he’s saying is that if you have these brain structures, you will have at least some level of functioning of these different types of consciousness. And of course the more processing power, so the more neurons in these different structures, the more complex your cognitive functions or your function at that level of consciousness should be. Because we know that the structures in our brain are very much the same structures you find in any mammalian brain, it really drives home the notion that we are not talking about issues of quality, but we’re talking about quantitative differences across brains. Once more, we’re not special. We’re remarkable, yes, in the level of complexity that we can achieve at all these different levels of consciousness. But we’re not outliers."