We reproduce an interview that appeared last Sunday in the Country to Antonio Damasio, MD, neurologist of Portuguese origin, author of one of the most interesting books on neuroscience "Descartes' Error."
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Brain Wizard
LUIS MIGUEL ARIZA 07/11/2010
On 13 September 1848, the foreman Phineas Gage, a handsome young man with dark hair and features of the model, incredibly survived a terrible accident. Had 25 years and one day he worked in the construction of a railroad in Cavendish, Vermont (United States). Their task was dangerous. I had to level the playing field, for which the workers drilled holes in the rock, stuffed with gunpowder and covered with sand. Gage selected holes to plant the explosives and the wick, and used a long iron rod to compact the mixture of sand and powder. Maybe he heard something that distracted him momentarily, but the fact is that they stuck his stick into the next hole before you fill his assistant Sandy. The spark caused an explosion and consequently the iron bar out of his hands fulminant. The missile, three inches thick and 109 long, entered under his left cheek, tore his brain like butter and escaped through the top of the skull. Gage fell struck down, as the rod that had pierced his head fell more than twenty yards behind him. His aides, horrified, thought he had died instantly. Were amazed when they found that the man regained consciousness and talked to them! Managed to walk leaning on them, and was transported in a bullock cart to your home. Witnesses recounted that Gage got out without help.
The first practitioner was horrified to see him, was stunned when the young man bored with his head calmly said that "now would have enough work." His personal physician, John Harlow, cut the bleeding one hour after and saved his life. Gage, a responsible young man, intelligent and socially well adapted, would recover within a few months. He could walk and fend for himself and kept his mind intact. He spoke without difficulty, and learning ability was unchanged. Nor had problems with memory. People whispered the word miracle around. It was an illusion. Something changed. To be a responsible man and appreciated, it became a subject irreverent, capricious, irresponsible and without honor, unable to carry out their plans. Gage lost his job and end up falling into the lowest, becoming for a time on a fairground ride of the entrepreneur PT Barnum, who ran a museum of human curiosities in New York. Never would follow the iron bar that made him famous, but would die years later from epileptic seizures and indifference.
Eight years after his death, Dr. Harlow suggested that the bar had destroyed parts of the cerebral cortex located in the left frontal lobe, which could explain the change in Gage's personality, a man caught between its cold intellectual faculties and animal propensities. " It was a revolutionary idea about how the brain handles higher aspects of human personality, but went unnoticed. Century and a half later, in 1994, the scientist Antonio Damasio published a critical article in the journal Science, which reconstructs the exact path of the rod through the skull and brain of Gage on a computer three-dimensional recreation. Damasio showed that damage to these prefrontal cortex areas were responsible for the management of emotions and decision-making process. These damages accurately explain the profound change of character of Gage, the most famous patient neurology.
Damasio (Lisbon, 1944) is a neuroscientist that has revolutionized the study of the brain basis of emotions in the last thirty years. Arguably one of the most neuroscientists global in a globalized world, with a humanistic education he is proud. Espinoza feels devotion and Descartes, thinkers faced "the first said that matter itself was divine, while the latter invented the dualism between body and soul," and admires Shakespeare. The human brain is a mystery within the other, consisting of 100,000 million neurons, and Damasio thinks, unlike many of his colleagues, which has always been the forest, not trees, that counts. There's something about the dignity of living beings and the man who prevents think we are ultimately the result of a set of biochemical reactions between neurons sophisticated they are. The brain, he says, is more than the sum of all parties, a mirror that reflects not only our individuality, it should be a society or even the whole humanity. Conclusions are reached Damasio after becoming the pioneer twentieth century's most important emotional research. "A big part of my work has been to make the study of feelings in anything scientific that allows us to better understand human behavior," he explains.
A little less than a quarter century, when the investigation of the brain was immersed in absolute rationalism, scientific study a sense, the proposal of Damasio, could lift more a polite smile. Now, emotions and brain basis symposia and research attracts like a magnet. The renowned researcher Kerry Ressler, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Maryland (USA), no doubt Damasio qualify as "a leader who reflects the global picture in neuroscience to offer an understanding of how complex functions arise", as related to Country Weekly by email.
Damasio speaks softly, gently. Because someone does not seem to get angry, but not be trusted. The day dawns covered with threatening storm clouds. Damasio has gone to Barcelona to present his latest book, and the brain created man (Target). Salta the view that the promotional interviews he tired, but happily slide after the first hour of conversation, trying to find out why things irritate you. At the end of the day, feeling upset about something is one of the most common human emotions. "There are a few things. Dinner at a restaurant and someone will ring the mobile phone, the sound. People are increasingly using mobile phones, and seem idiots talking to themselves while walking on the street. ... It is so unnecessary ago ten years, people had no children and lived happily. We do it simply because we have the gadget. There are companies that are doing a lot of money. And it gets worse. Some airlines already allow cell phone use on airplanes. You're flying, and air also bear the noise of the engines, you have to hear people arguing with his mother about the problems with the children. "
The chatter is what most upsets one of the teachers human emotions, which has moved his studio from the philosophical-a tradition of centuries of neuroscience, showing how we are moved on the screens of the scanners, and tracking the brain circuits behind. It was precisely the study of injuries Neurological and how they affect the behavior of patients, including loss language for damage to the left temporal lobe, which found the scientist Paul Broca eight years after the death of Gage-that led to Damasio and his wife, Hanna, to systematically build a database of patients with late seventies at the University of Iowa "We needed a method to acquire information. One of them was the study of neurological injury in patients." Then in the next two decades, and new brain-imaging the PET scanner or fMRI, fabulous windows, fully functioning brain, Damasio and his wife could track the brains of healthy volunteers and making comparisons, researching the language, memory, visual perception, and how the brain acted when I had to make a decision. It was here when they discovered the tremendous importance of emotions.
How did it happen? There was one patient in particular took a very obvious very wrong decision after suffering a frontal lobe damage. But he was very intelligent, had much knowledge. His memory and language were normal. Except that their emocionesno were normal. So that gave me the idea that these abnormal emotions could play a role in their decisions.
How behaved that sick? Talked with him and could feel it was very smart. But out of the conversation was crazy, how to invest their money in businesses that obviously is going to collapse, or get very strange with his wife. When it came to act in real life, took the wrong decision. What is easy for us took him an eternity. Did not feel that hunch that says: "I like it." Going to a restaurant, you see and think, agree. This patient and many others saw things. Lost in questions like "is a good menu? Is it good value? How good is the relationship between the menu and the price? How far is the restaurant? Is full? Empty? Why is it empty? If it is, is good because you always have room. But if it is empty, because the restaurant is not good ... it's an endless process of discussion. His damages were located in a region called the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, where emotions and intellectual processes interact.
You have shattered the cliché that to make the right decisions have to put emotions aside. The logic of Dr. Spock in the series 'Star Trek'. If I have to fire someone, you must be cold. Or a business decision, be careful what you feel. Do not be affected. Business need of emotions to make the right decisions. If you have to lay off employees, you know what is the logic and emotion that drives you to do so, and when you can not be sentimental. They are emotional and intellectual processes. It is true that there are certain emotions that should be hidden. In the Exchange from time to time there is a stock market crash, an excess of fear that makes you retire from the market. And it's not smart. If you are less fearful and cope, you will benefit when the market recovers. If you control the fear, you can make advantageous decisions. But if you feel no fear, no way of knowing when to stop. And it may come a time where you have to withdraw from the market, but do not have that possibility. It is true that the best not to feel anything. But there are certain emotions in the short term it is better not to have, as excess fear. According
. Can we educate our emotional response even arise so visceral? To some extent, yes. You can not learn to move you to be sad, happy, compassionate, all that is already in the brain. But the degree to which those emotions are expressed can be educated, learn to modulate.
Give an example. If you're afraid of flying, you can go to a school that has a flight simulator in which you are exposed to turbulence, take offs and landings ... and if you understand what happens, learn to desensitize these emotions to a certain extent .
If we can modulate our emotional response, do you think is an achievement that distinguishes us from animals? Definitely. There are very intelligent animals who can not modulate their emotions. Modulation of human emotion is a product of culture. Is a consequence of consciousness. A good example is violence. In Western society, we are now less violent than sixty years ago or five centuries. The control of violence is the result of modulation of emotions.
Worldwide, tens of armed conflict and the news we are inundated with violence. Yes, but there is no doubt that there was more violence at the time of Henry VIII today. And our tolerance of violence is falling. In all Western countries, domestic violence was accepted, but now is not tolerated. In terms of sexual orientation or race, try to accept people different from others. It is a cultural phenomenon, but it requires emotional control. Difference is always creates aggression, but you can control it.
You commented that societal self-regulation mimics the work done by the brain to keep us alive. Called cultural homeostasis. There are two levels. One regulates the heartbeat, blood circulation, blood pressure, immunity, digestion, hormonal system ... and we can not interfere. Homeostasis keeps us from being too hot or too cold. It gives us the feeling of hunger, so that soon we will want to take lunch instead of talk, or thirst. Is given by the genes. Our consciousness has nothing to do. The other is social homeostasis, we can have justice, prosperity, economic, political parties, medicine and technology. Without awareness, we could never have created the social homeostasis. We would have no culture. For this you need to know. And be aware. Conscience lets us know, and for the most extreme culture gives us, that we as human beings better. And everything depends on certain parts of the brain working together. Some are in the cerebral cortex, while others are below it.
jealously hides Brain its mysteries. When altering the circuits that control movement, Parkinson's tremors occur. If the reports are destroyed catastrophically, the erasing end Alzheimer personality. Depression sinks and we do not know why, but there is a cause in the brain. Schizophrenia, where dreams become delusions that invade the everyday, is a reality created by the brain. There is also a vicious brain seeks pleasure and vibrates with the reward, whose study discovers why a person hooked on drugs "can not control the impulse to them even when he confesses that no longer produce pleasure," according to Nora Volkow, National Institute on Drug Abuse United States stated in the agenda of U.S. journalist Charlie Rose.
A brain cortex displayed millimeter represented as maps of the senses. And a brain that, suitably excited, we thought rescues forgotten. In the middle of last century, the neurologist Wilder Penfield was astonished when, by stimulating the temporal lobe area of \u200b\u200bone of his patients with epilepsy, evoked in his mind the song her mother sang to him for Christmas. The brain is also aggressive. In a more recent study on teens, psychologist Nicholas Allen, University of Melbourne, Australia, found that boys who argued with much more vehemently with his parents in controlled sessions clearly had larger tonsils according to the scanner (the tonsils are almond-shaped structures and are located beneath the cortex). There is an intellectual brain. "In parts of the brain that we understand the complex language that allows us to operate at a higher social status and transmit skills and education, is the difference between us as humans," says Kerry Ressler. And a moral brain, with room for feelings of pity, admiration and shame. "The Commandments are not carved in stone, with reference to the tables of the law of Moses, but in the gelatinous mass which is the brain," says Professor Francisco Rubio, director of the Multidisciplinary Institute of the Complutense University and a member of the Royal Academy of Medicine. Morality and emotions appear to be related. And the likely geography Blonde says, the cerebral cortex ventromedial prefrontal region, ie the womb through the forehead.
emotions and reason form an alliance. Damasio and his colleagues examined the responses of six people whose brain scans appeared to damage in these brain regions because of a tumor or stroke. Would you be able to throw someone overboard to save himself or others? Would you sacrifice an innocent, a hostage, in order to save your life or that of others? What would be your reaction? The idea of \u200b\u200bkilling an innocent cause disgust. But those six people did not feel compassion, according to the analysis of their responses, as recorded by the study published by Nature three years ago. Were freed of any emotional impact when making a rational decision.
Damasio says that, under normal conditions, humans have two ways of working, or are connected online and we were excited by what we see and hear at the time, or disconnected (offline) when a memory and put rescue then that memory on position along with the associated emotion. To remember the death of a loved one, the memory brings the pain. To understand how to operate these modes, I suggest a game. What would happen if, while we talk, someone free on the table between us a black mamba, the most poisonous snake in Africa? "Your brain perceives the object that will cause excitement. It is an object emotional competence, and will occur automatically, without interference of your own consciousness, a series of reactions.'re Going to change position, to be alarmed at experience changes in the face. The rhythm of your heart racing. There are changes in your guts. Your skin pale. Or you get paralyzed, or run. depend on the circumstances. In your bloodstream cortisol is pumped to mobilize a large amount of energy and running. The brain does it automatically, you can not interfere. And you realize what's going to stay or run stone for fear of the snake. Everything happens very quickly, in less than a hundred milliseconds.
why can not predict whether a stampede leave or not. Right. If you were a soldier with combat training, would be easier to choose stand still or flee. You have brought the system to one or the other. Frankly, if we had here a snake, I have no idea what would happen to me. I've never had the experience, I do not know if I stay still or not. I hope run!
Have you ever found in a very dangerous situation? Once, on a plane I thought I was going to crash. It was thirty years ago. He was tied to my seat and very scared. But I could not do anything, with my seat belt fastened, and the plane doing all these things so much fun ... everyone was convinced that it would crash.
insists in his book to distinguish what is an emotion of feeling. Emotion is a program of actions. The human nervous system, or nervous system, is involved in a series of actions to protect themselves. Either by the defense against the threat, or providing an opportunity for food or sex. Prevents death and do things beneficial. Then there is the reading of that action. When you perceive what is happening in your body when you have that emotion, then there is the feeling. Excite is acting. Feeling is perceiving. Two are related. An emotion in general is a feeling, but refers to the action, while the sentiment is the perception of that action.
Is there any place in the geography of our brain that tells us if we have wood hero or villain? Well, that would be science fiction. Is too complex. There are parts of the brain that process aspects of emotions in a very automatic, and others where you perceive what is happening. And then there are all the knowledge you have acquired, our conversation, it will not by automatic systems. We have built an entire culture. You and I have some ideas about what should be a hero or a coward. And you know how to use that knowledge to, or control your behavior and decide something independent of the automatic mechanism, or just think you do not want to be a hero and I'm going to sit still to save his life. All these things are intended to post. What I tell my readers is that one can not understand consciousness based on a single situation. Human behavior is organized into layers. When we do something, or somebody does something, each layer sends a stronger, some of which we are aware and others not. Is a chain of responses and reviews.
what our brain rather than a reading of all these emotions? Twenty years ago I proposed, the insula or insular cortex (a structure beneath the rift that separates the frontal and temporal lobe), which today is one of the most observed. The island produces a portrait of any emotion that assaults the body. Another more recent, of which not much has been said, is the brain stem. This is where you made the portraits of the most primal feelings. And whatever happens there is redrawn in the cortex brain.
How would you define consciousness? It is what allows one to realize oneself and others. Depends on the mind and conscious process. It is very important and complex human beings. It involves language, memory.
Can we speak of a geography of consciousness? I like that suggestion. Even raised me to title the book. If you destroy the back of the brain stem in humans, destroy consciousness. You go into a vegetative state from which you may never recover. It is a very important part of the brain that produces consciousness. If you miss some parts of the brain, or certain parts of the cerebral cortex and the middle crust later, you will lose consciousness. Are very important to build a sense of self, of being conscious of self autobiographical.
And the moral? The shame, admiration, or guilt. All are located in the prefrontal cortex. Feelings such as compassion or admiration, connected to the brain stem produce such emotions. Damasio
researching at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (United States) along with his wife, Hanna, whom he met when he was studying in Portugal. On the campus of the University stands, since 2006, the Brain and Creativity Institute (in English, Brain and Creativity Institute), where, armed with sophisticated technology to visualize the brain in full operation, is trying to locate the processing of emotions and other functions. Many wanted to see in a computer brain wet, from the years of the pioneers of artificial intelligence (AI) as Marvin Minsky, in the fifties. Roboticists as Hans Moravec emotional machines still betting that someday surpass the human brain. To Ressler, the analogy with the computer is "limited, but reasonable. There are similarities in how we store memories and how they are stored in a computer. At the molecular level, both use a physical process." Of course, there are differences in the way neurons communicate and how they think silicon processors. For Professor Blonde, "is likely one day we can replicate the human brain into a machine, do not put gates to the field." But the obstacles are not insignificant: to simulate emotions and how these affect rational thinking, which "not yet well known, and design a machine capable of changing its connections with experience, as well as networks of neurons rearranged over time. Damasio, however, is more skeptical. "If you ask me if the brain does calculations, I will say yes. But it's like a digital computer?" No ". Either in its construction, or the way they work, he said. There are too many differences. The ultimate test of a bow by artificial intelligence would be the construction of machines in the future capable of believing in a god. At the end of the day, is not a religious experience purely cerebral, I ask to Damasio.
How to explain the fact that 93% of humanity has any belief? The construction of religions is one of the most important creative acts of human beings, in response to situations of suffering and pain, to get relief, and to explain the universe as a beautiful creation. It is not surprising that so many religious people. And for a scientist is perfectly possible to feel that way. The scientist comes to science and technology to explain the world, not faith. But these issues are not exclusive. This is not to say that if you are religious, you do not know, and therefore should not be. Scientists know very good and faithful. Worlds are perfectly compatible.
Perhaps because religion and science are creative acts in the brain? No doubt. And although it is possible to live with them. I'm not saying believe in both. Francis Collins is one of the leaders of the Genome Project and director of the National Institutes of Health in the United States. Directs the federal agency for research in biotechnology. Works in the genes and is a great believer, attends Mass and writes books about his life as a genetic and a believer in God.
Einstein used to say that atheists are unable fans hear the music of the spheres. Was someone emotionally? Yes, and practicing music, playing the violin. Used to explain that in his theoretical work, when faced with a problem that needed solving, I did in terms of ecstasy to feel if something was right or not. Or if something was beautiful, like an equation.
You love to reread Shakespeare. Why? He was someone who was incredibly alert to the emotions and even consciousness. Writer is provides a more direct autobiographical ego. In the soliloquies of Hamlet, when he speaks of himself, his doubts, how he deals with the situation of the death of his father and marrying his mother and his uncle, reveals the part of oneself connected to your story, your joys and sorrows, the facts that form part of your life, where you were born, and from whom.
