This week’s conversation is with Dr. Antonio Damasio, a Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy, and Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. 

Trained as both neurologist and neuroscientist, Antonio has made seminal contributions to the understanding of brain processes underlying affect and consciousness.

His work on the role of emotions and feelings in decision-making has made a major impact in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy.

Antonio is considered one of the most eminent psychologists of the modern era – you may be familiar him with from his previous appearance on Finding Mastery – episode 168.

Antonio is brilliant… when I speak with him, I find myself on the edge of my seat – my mind expanded and my heart thumping with excitement for what he’s about to share.

I wanted to have Antonio back on to discuss his recent work, which addresses the evolutionary development of the mind – the intersection between feelings, consciousness, the nervous system – and how a deeper understanding can lead to a robustness of flourishing.

His newest book: Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious is fantastic!

“Emotions and feelings are very different things. And what is a pity, is that most of the time, people confuse the two.”

In This Episode:

The difference between emotions and feelings

When I started my work, I had not realized that there ought to be very clear, different words for these two processes. The fundamental difference is that emotion is all about action. In fact, even the etymology of the word is sparking you in that direction. It’s about movement. It’s about action. It’s about action directed to the outside, motion. Whereas feeling is not at all about action. It’s subjective, it’s all internal. You couldn’t really have two more different things. One, acting. The other, something that is interior. Emotions are public. Anybody can look at my emoting and decide what my state of mind is, make guesses and diagnosis, whatever. Feelings are entirely private, and my feelings you do not know. You will never see them. You will never be able to look at a feeling. You’ll never be able to observe my feelings. Purely internal, purely in the mind. What could be more different?

Public vs. private

The key is public versus private. Emotion is public, feeling is private. There are constant interactions. As time moves, you can be emoting and having feelings that correspond to those emotions, and they may be connected to the moment, to what’s around you, or you may have a thought that provokes a certain feeling internally and may be expressed in part also in your body. It’s the public and the private, and there’s a two way street. Things are constantly moving in one direction or another.

The magic of feelings

The first creatures that had feelings were not creatures with our kinds of brain and with our kinds of thinking process. They were obviously very, very simple to begin with, but they had to have a nervous system. And the key there is that I believe, and this is one of my strongest points to defend, and it’s a very strong hypothesis, that you would never have gotten feeling if you did not have this interaction between the nervous system and the rest of the living body. That’s the magic.

Consciousness is not about vision

I tire of listening to explanations of consciousness that start with how things look on the outside and how great our vision system is and how wonderful that is to generate consciousness. Sorry, this had to start much earlier than vision. This started modestly early on with the fact that you have one part of this equation, which is the nervous system, inside the living body. The landscape outside my windows is there quietly and I’m here. That landscape is not inside my body at all. I can make a picture of it the same way that you could make a photograph of it, and that picture is inside my brain momentarily. But in the case of the body and the nervous system it’s a different story. The nervous system is inside the body. The two things can interact, and they do.

Rather, consciousness is about ownership

The key to understanding consciousness and the value of consciousness is defining self and an owner. Why is consciousness an interesting issue and an interesting problem? Very simply because it allows you to know and be certain of the fact that whatever is in your mind is happening to you and it belongs to you. These are sort of odd ways of describing it, but there’s no better way. You can say, “Well, consciousness is what gives you a self.” That’s perfectly correct, but it’s not sufficiently clear. A greater clarity comes from the notion of ownership and the notion, the answering of a question. Could there be a confusion? Could it be that I am looking at you right now on the screen and it’s not me doing the looking? It’s somebody beside me, somebody somewhere else? Of course the answer is no.

The hard question of, “What is consciousness?”

Trying to understand the problem of consciousness is trying to understand how this is possible. How is it that I am without any equivocation certain that what I have in my mind is mine, which means what I have in my mind belongs to my mind, belongs to my living organism, and belongs right now, and that’s the end of the story. So ownership is really the key. The project of understanding what consciousness is is the project of understanding how it is that my mind could allow me, my mind, same thing, to be convinced that this is mine. That’s it.

“Feelings are the inaugural event of consciousness…”

It’s very, very dramatic because feelings are spontaneously naturally conscious, or they wouldn’t be of any use to you. What would be the use of you having pain if you were not conscious of the pain? What would be the use of you being hungry and therefore being told by your nervous system, by your organism, go and eat, get something to eat, if it wouldn’t be naturally conscious? Once you get the first homeostatic feelings, namely hunger, thirst, pain, wellbeing, malaise, desire, all of these things are the immediate representations at a conscious level of states of your organism. And they were selected in evolution for the very important reason that they provide living organisms with  a way out to save themselves.

Why we care so much about what others think of us

Our social relations have become so important and have become so critical to the point that in certain ways they are almost at the level of fundamental homeostatic/metabolic needs. It’s like food, like drink. Why? Because what others think of us can influence how others will treat us, how others will allow us or not to progress according to the plans we have for our lives. Anything social is always a projection of our minds into other minds and comes out of the multiplicity of other minds that surround us. That’s why almost everything that you find in social endeavors, human social endeavors, including politics or the arts, sports, anything, it’s really influenced by those basic tenets of our biological structure and of the way our neural structures are organizing it.

Feelings are the gateway into our own consciousness

Once you have feelings about whatever is happening to you and about your life as it goes on, you have the material to construct your ownership, your self. Once you have that, whatever comes into your mind is blessed by that consciousness. It gets that support of consciousness from the fundamental process of life, so you don’t need to have a visual consciousness or a smelling consciousness or whatever. You just need to be conscious, which really means that you are a feeling creature and that you are aware that what is going in your mind, like ticker tape that is crossing your mind in different tracks, visual, auditory, tactile, that all of that belongs to you. You are going to spread over the goods of consciousness through feeling into everything that is happening around you.

How we sharpen/focus on things that matter to us

There’s certain things that are naturally sharp, and they’re naturally sharp because they are of such value to us. By the way, that sharpness in some cases is actually determined by evolution itself and by the way we’re constituted. So there’s certain things that will always be sharp, certain themes that are always going to be wrapped onto. And it depends. It varies a little bit with the personalities, but that’s going to be there. And then there are certain things that are going to be sharp that have become sharp-able out of your own experience. And you may have had, for example, an experience with certain kinds of people that will make certain events that ought to be trite suddenly become  important.

The mistake we often make when it comes to consciousness and feelings

There is one monstrous mistake that people have been doing over and over again, and I did it for many years, and that is to attribute things like consciousness, or feeling for that matter, to the brain alone. That is a tragic mistake. If you read most of the philosophical discussions on consciousness, the big problem, whether it is the hard problem or something that passes for it, it’s always it. How could the brain do this? How can the brain, which is physical, do something which is mental? Who asked you to have the brain do it for you? That’s absolutely unnecessary. The brain, by the way, which is truly a short word for nervous system, the brain is simply acting as one of the two partners that are essential for the process. But the body is not at all the minor partner. The brain is the decisive partner. The nervous system is the decisive partner, but to have a feeling, to have consciousness without the body is an absurdity. And it’s precisely if you concentrate on feelings rather than on the rest that you realize that this is absurd, because what is the feeling of? The feeling is of the body.

Feeling, and the knowledge of feeling

My humble little book is called Feeling and Knowing. Feeling and the knowledge that it brings, and then it makes you conscious. When you think about it, it’s terrific. It’s because up to the point where feelings emerge, organisms have a “blind” way of running their lives. There was a lot of intelligence, but it’s all covert intelligence. When you look at organisms without nervous systems, whether talking about a simple bacterium or a much more complex organ, multicellular or even multisystem, those organisms were very intelligent, except that they didn’t know that they were intelligent. And they don’t today, because what they have is mechanisms to adjust homeostasis. They do have to seek proper temperature around them. They do have to seek energy sources. They do have to have a metabolism, and yet they don’t know they’re doing those things. What does it mean they don’t know? It means that they cannot represent internally either the problem or the solution that they are very gingerly producing. Once you have nervous systems and once feelings emerge, then this new way, this brave new way, of managing life begins. And that’s a way in which knowledge and liberation play a role.

The film strip analogy

This distinction between consciousness and mind: The mind is like a film track running, not conscious, it’s just mind. It’s just mind flowing. Consciousness is when that film is running, and lo and behold, I know that that film is inside me. It’s my film. That’s when we get consciousness.

How do you train your mind?

Thinking, analyzing. Exercising. There’s something very similar that you can do. Of course it’s better if you do it early in life than late, but you just do and do again and try to do better. I can write exactly on the same topic with numerous, numerous attempts at clarifying a thought and actually write it in words – in pencil. I’m a great believer in pencils with erasers. It’s absolutely essential. Pencil and eraser. I write and I erase and I come back and I modify. A lot of things you end up writing are garbage, but it’s a great way when you look and you come back and you realize where the flaw is in the argument, and you try to make it better. And none of that protects you from still saying stupid things – or writing stupid things, which is worse – but it goes a long way to avoiding it.