Word: damasio
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However, Descartes was profoundly wrong, it appears, in his assertion that mind and body are wholly independent. The mind, argues University of Iowa neurologist Antonio Damasio in his book Descartes' Error, is created by the body-specifically by the brain. Utterly contrary to common sense, though, and to the evidence gathered from our own introspection, consciousness may be nothing more than an evanescent by-product of more mundane, wholly physical processes -- much as a rainbow is the result of the interplay of light and raindrops. Input from the senses clearly plays a part; so do body chemicals whose...
...pattern is reinforced-by repeated sightings of the person, by the effort to remember him or by connection with some other mental trigger ("This woman is attractive; she's worth getting to know better," or, "This man looks unpleasant; I need to avoid him")-the more likely, says Damasio, the pattern, or image, will not go into short-term memory, lasting weeks or months, but into permanent, long-term memory. And from there, barring brain injury, disease or old age, it can be re-created by inducing the neurons to send up electric impulses in the old, by now familiar...
...memories: if our distant ancestors hadn't had an instant and violent reaction to danger, they would not have lived very long. But other parts of the brain are apparently also involved in feeling emotions. What's most surprising is the assertion by the University of Iowa's Damasio that emotion is central to the process of rational thought...
...evidence comes from nearly two dozen patients treated by Damasio, including Elliot, the businessman who started behaving irrationally after surgery to remove a brain tumor. Elliot cannot behave rationally, even though his intelligence was not affected by his tumor. The part of the brain destroyed by invading tissue was in a region of the prefrontal cortex (see diagram) essential to decision making. But what Elliot lost, psychological testing revealed, was the ability to experience emotion. While the amygdala does process fear, his doctors argue from the example of Elliot and the other patients that other parts of the brain...
...such a test could create a dilemma of a different sort: do people really want to know that Alzheimer's lies in their future when medicine can offer no cure? "If there's no way of controlling what happens to you," observes University of Iowa neurologist Dr. Antonio Damasio, "then it's unclear that early diagnosis provides an advantage. What you're probably going to do is worry yourself sick...